One Illinois Line, or a Residential Pool Billed by the Gigabyte?
Two products are sold under the heading of mobile or residential proxies, and they are built on opposite principles. The first is a single carrier line: one SIM, one device, one customer, a flat price for the period, data not metered. The second is a pool: a large set of addresses borrowed from many households or handsets, shared among all of the provider's customers, billed by the amount of data that passes. Illinois Proxies sells only the first kind. This page compares the two on the questions an Illinois business actually asks, states our prices exactly and the pool prices in general terms, and ends with a plain view of which to use for what.
The two models side by side
The table below sets the properties of a dedicated Illinois line beside those of a typical metered residential pool. The pool column describes the common shape of such services as they are generally sold; providers differ in the details, and you should read the one you are considering.
| Question | Dedicated Illinois line | Metered residential pool |
|---|---|---|
| Who else uses the address | Nobody; the SIM and device are yours for the period | Every customer of the pool who is routed to it |
| How you pay | Flat: $5 a day, $28 a week, $65 a month on 4G; $6, $31, $75 on 5G | Per gigabyte, typically a few dollars up to around ten per gigabyte, less in large bundles |
| Data | Not metered; fair use for proxy work | Every byte counted, including page assets and retries |
| Where the address is | Chicago, Illinois, AT&T, T-Mobile or Verizon regional pool | Wherever the pool has supply; state targeting often costs more and may thin out |
| Keeping an address | Sticky for as long as the carrier holds the session; rotate when you choose | Sticky sessions offered for minutes, sometimes an hour, then reassigned |
| Getting a new address | Dashboard, rotation link, API, timer; carrier reassigns | Automatic per request or per session; limited control over which exit you get |
| Network type seen by a site | Mobile carrier, autonomous system of the carrier | Mixed: cable, DSL, fibre, some mobile, depending on supply |
| Speed | 4G typically 20 to 45 Mbps; 5G 50 Mbps or more | Varies with the household behind the exit; often lower and uneven |
| Protocols | HTTP, HTTPS, SOCKS5 with UDP | Usually HTTP and SOCKS5; UDP rarely |
| Moving location | Free move between our US cities; remaining time carries over | Change a parameter; subject to supply in the new place |
| Support | People, by email and Telegram, around the clock | Varies; often ticket-based with a queue |
What the money buys
A dedicated line is paid for by time. A 4G line is $5 for a day, $28 for a week or $65 for a month, and the 5G tier is $6, $31 or $75. A two-hour start costs $2 on 4G or $3 on 5G, and those hours count toward the daily plan if you continue. Within the period you use the line as much as the fair use rule allows, and the bill does not change.
A pool is paid for by volume. The going rate for residential data runs from a few dollars per gigabyte at the top of a large bundle to around ten dollars per gigabyte for small purchases, and mobile-only pools sit higher still. Volume is the whole bill, so every image a page loads, every script, every retry on a failed request and every background call an app makes is charged. A single busy day of browser work on a media-rich platform can consume several gigabytes without anyone noticing until the invoice arrives.
The crossover is easy to find for your own work: estimate the gigabytes a month of your usage moves, multiply by the rate you are quoted, and compare with $65 or $75. For most account-management and verification work the dedicated line is cheaper after the first week of the month. For a one-off scrape of a few hundred megabytes, the pool is cheaper, and we say so.
Control of the address
On a dedicated line you decide when the address changes. Leave it, and the carrier holds the session, commonly for hours and often for a day or more. Rotate, and you get another address from the same regional pool within a moment. The site sees a consistent visitor for as long as you want consistency, and a different one when you want difference. That control is what makes it possible to run an account from one address for a month, to log in from where you logged out, and to show a platform the kind of steady history it expects from a real person.
On a pool the address is assigned by the provider's gateway, and sticky sessions, where offered, are measured in minutes. Two requests a minute apart may leave from two different households in two different towns. Some platforms tolerate that; others score it as a sign that the visitor is not what it seems. The pool customer cannot choose, and cannot know who else used the same exit in the hour before.
Geolocation and the Illinois question
A dedicated line from our Chicago rack carries an address that AT&T, T-Mobile or Verizon assigns from its regional pool, and the geolocation services that websites consult place it at Chicago or at the state of Illinois. The reading is consistent across services and across days, because the pool is the carrier's and does not drift. The time zone implied is Central. For an Illinois business comparing what its own site shows to a local visitor, or an agency confirming a statewide campaign, that is the reading required.
A pool offers state targeting as a filter, and the honesty of the filter depends on the quality of the provider's own geolocation data. Supply in a particular state thins out at busy times, and some providers quietly widen the filter to the region rather than fail the request. The address class is also mixed: a residential cable exit and a mobile exit are classified differently, and a check that expects a mobile carrier may be surprised by a fibre line in a suburb.
Reliability, speed and support
A line in our rack is monitored around the clock. If a modem drops off the network, our systems see it and restart it, and if the hardware fails we swap it. The speed you see is the speed of one carrier device with one customer on it: typically 20 to 45 Mbps on 4G and 50 Mbps or more on 5G. Support is a person at [email protected] or on the Telegram bot, at any hour, who can look at your specific line.
A pool exit is somebody's home connection or handset, contributed through an app or an SDK, and it goes away when that device sleeps, loses signal or leaves the app. The provider routes around it, which keeps the service up, but the speed and the latency of any given request depend on a stranger's connection. Support, when it exists, is answering for a shared system, not for your line.
Where a pool is the better choice
Fairness requires the other side. A pool is the right tool when the job needs thousands of distinct addresses in a short time, such as a broad crawl that must not hit any one site from the same address twice. It is the right tool when the addresses must be spread across many states or countries at once, and when the total data is small, so that the per-gigabyte bill stays low. A dedicated line cannot give you a thousand addresses an hour, and we do not pretend otherwise. Many customers run both: a pool for the wide, shallow crawl and an Illinois line for the deep, careful work on the accounts and checks that matter.
How to decide
Ask three questions. Does the work need the same address for more than a few minutes at a time? Does it need the visitor to read as an Illinois mobile customer? Does it move more than a gigabyte or two a month? A yes to any one of them points toward the dedicated line, and a yes to all three makes it the obvious choice. A no to all three points toward a pool. A two-hour line for $2 is the cheapest way to settle the question with your own platforms rather than with anyone's brochure.
Questions about per-GB pricing
Is the dedicated line really unmetered?
Yes. There is no meter and no allowance. The only limit is fair use: the SIM is for proxy work, not for bulk file transfer.
Can I get a thousand Illinois addresses from one line?
No. One line holds one address at a time and rotates to another on request. For very large address counts a pool is the right product.
What does a pool usually charge per gigabyte?
Broadly, from a few dollars in large bundles to around ten dollars for small purchases, with mobile-only pools above that. Check the provider you are considering.
Will a pool exit read as a mobile carrier?
Only if the particular exit is a handset. Most residential pool exits are home broadband and are classified as such.
Can I try the line before committing to a month?
Yes. Two hours is $2 on 4G or $3 on 5G, a day is $5 or $6, and the hours paid count toward the day if you continue.