Every proxy comparison article eventually says the same thing: mobile IPs get blocked less than datacenter IPs, because that is what the marketing of everyone selling mobile proxies says. We run a UK mobile proxy service, so we are exactly the kind of company you should not take at its word. Instead we ran the same polite workload through a UK mobile exit and a datacenter exit, from the same machine, with the same clients, and counted every response. This article is those numbers, unedited, plus the exact commands so you can reproduce the test against any provider you are evaluating.

The short version

With a browser-grade client fingerprint, requests through the UK mobile pool succeeded on 109 of 110 requests across ten popular UK sites. The identical client, the same machine, the same ten sites, through a datacenter IP: 72 of 110. Four of the ten sites challenged or blocked the datacenter IP while letting the mobile pool through. Zero sites did the reverse.

With a naive curl client, both IP types suffered: 45% success on mobile, 36% on datacenter. That contrast is the most useful thing this test shows, and it comes before any IP-type question: on the hardest sites, your HTTP fingerprint decides your fate before your IP does.

There is an honest counterweight, and we will give it its own section: the datacenter leg was about twenty times faster to first byte and three and a half times faster on raw download speed. Datacenter bandwidth is cheaper. If your targets do not block it, you should be using it.

How we ran it

Two legs, one machine, run sequentially on 2 October 2026:

Two clients, identical on both legs:

Targets: ten popular UK sites across groceries, retail, property, autos, ticketing and news, plus Wikipedia as a control that should never block anyone. Ten requests per target per leg, two seconds apart, sequential. "Success" means an HTTP 200 response whose body contains no challenge marker: no "Access Denied", no "Just a moment", no "unusual traffic", no identity-verification interstitial.

First, what each exit actually is. We asked ip-api.com through each leg, unedited responses:

{"country":"United Kingdom","isp":"British Telecommunications PLC",
 "org":"EE Limited","as":"AS2856 British Telecommunications Limited",
 "mobile":true,"proxy":false,"hosting":false,"query":"31.94.34.198"}

{"country":"Germany","city":"Limburg an der Lahn","isp":"OVH SAS",
 "org":"OVH GmbH","as":"AS16276 OVH SAS",
 "mobile":false,"proxy":false,"hosting":true,"query":"141.95.51.235"}

One exit registers as a UK mobile connection. The other registers as hosting. Those two booleans are what the whole comparison turns on.

One more property worth showing rather than asserting: the mobile pool rotates. Three consecutive requests, three different exits on two carriers:

{"country":"United Kingdom","isp":"Hutchison 3G UK Ltd","mobile":true,"query":"92.40.171.63"}
{"country":"United Kingdom","isp":"British Telecommunications PLC","mobile":true,"query":"31.94.38.143"}
{"country":"United Kingdom","isp":"British Telecommunications PLC","mobile":true,"query":"31.94.6.47"}

The datacenter leg used a single IP for all 110 requests, which is how a datacenter proxy behaves in practice. We will come back to this in the limitations.

The results

Successes out of 10 requests per site. "curl" is the naive client, "Chrome fp" the browser-fingerprint client:

Site curl, mobile curl, DC Chrome fp, mobile Chrome fp, DC
Tesco Groceries 0 0 10 10
Sainsbury's 0 0 10 10
ASDA Groceries 0 0 10 2
Argos 0 0 10 10
Currys 0 0 10 0
Rightmove 10 10 10 10
Zoopla 0 0 9 0
Autotrader 10 10 10 10
Ticketmaster 10 0 10 0
BBC News 9 10 10 10
Wikipedia (control) 10 10 10 10
Total (excl. control) 49/100 40/100 99/100 62/100

Four findings, in order of size:

1. The fingerprint gate comes first. Tesco and Sainsbury's returned "Access Denied" to the naive curl client on both legs, 403 every time, mobile or datacenter. The same two sites returned full pages to the Chrome-fingerprint client on both legs, ten times out of ten. If your client does not match its user-agent, the hardest sites block you before your IP is even considered. We wrote a whole separate piece about this, How Websites Fingerprint Your Scraper, because it is the single most common cause of 403s we see.

2. The IP-type gate comes second, and it is large. Same client, same fingerprint, same machine: 99% success on the mobile pool versus 62% on the datacenter IP. Four sites decided purely on IP reputation:

Beyond this test set, the best-known examples of IP-type blocking are the social media platforms. Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube treat traffic from datacenter ranges with deep suspicion, which is why guides to running accounts on them at scale consistently recommend mobile or residential connections. We left social platforms out of the measured set deliberately: their blocks engage around logins and account actions rather than a first page view, so a polite page-view test would understate them. If your workload touches social platforms, treat the IP-type gap as wider than four sites out of ten, not narrower.

3. Some sites do not care, at polite volume. Rightmove, Autotrader, Argos and the BBC returned full pages to everything we threw at them, both clients, both legs. Ten polite requests every two seconds does not trigger rate-based rules. A scraping workload at real volume is a different question, and one this test deliberately does not answer.

4. Nothing in the results favored the datacenter IP on blocking. The closest to a counter-example is Argos and Tesco, which passed the datacenter leg fine, ten out of ten. But no site in this set blocked the mobile pool while passing the datacenter IP.

The part where datacenter wins

Measured from the same machine, same session:

Metric UK mobile pool Datacenter (OVH, DE)
Median time to first byte 0.75 s ~0.04 s
Average TTFB (naive client workload) 1.68 s 0.08 s
10 MB download 11.0 Mbps 38.9 Mbps
Sustained load, 2 minutes 697 req/min, 100.0% success not measured (no proxy in path)

The mobile leg's p90 TTFB was 0.92 s, with the p95 pulled to 7.4 s by occasional radio reconfiguration. The datacenter leg averaged 80 milliseconds. That is physics: 4G radio versus fiber, plus the extra hop through the device. If you are fetching megabytes of static content from endpoints that never block anyone, a datacenter connection is the correct tool, and it is cheaper per gigabyte than mobile. Use it.

The interesting case is the workload in between: fetching from sites that sometimes block, where a failed request costs a retry, a delay, or a poisoned session. There the arithmetic flips, because a 403 is infinitely slower than any first byte.

Reproduce it yourself

The whole test is two loops. Naive client, mobile leg:

while read url; do
  for i in $(seq 1 10); do
    curl -sS -o /tmp/body -x "https://USER:PASS@proxy.example:6889" \
      -A "Mozilla/5.0 ... Chrome/129" -L --max-time 30 \
      -w "%{http_code} %{time_starttransfer}\n" "$url"
    grep -aoiE "access denied|just a moment|unusual traffic" /tmp/body
    sleep 2
  done
done < targets.txt

Swap -x out for the datacenter leg. For the browser-fingerprint client, the Python equivalent is one line with curl_cffi:

from curl_cffi import requests
r = requests.get(url, impersonate="chrome",
                 proxies={"https": "https://USER:PASS@proxy.example:6889"},
                 timeout=30)

One habit worth building while you watch these loops run: read your latencies. A failure that returns in tens of milliseconds never reached the target site. It is your proxy, or an edge in front of it, refusing the connection. Real target-site blocks arrive after a full round trip, with an HTTP status and a challenge page.

Limitations, stated plainly

What we would take from this

Fix your fingerprint before you spend money on any proxy: the biggest single jump in this table came from the client, not the IP. After that, IP type decides the sites that check, and on UK retail in October 2026 that was four sites out of ten hard-blocking a clean datacenter IP and none blocking the mobile pool. And if your targets never block you, enjoy the fiber.

Summary

We ran identical polite workloads through a UK mobile proxy pool and a datacenter IP on ten popular UK sites, with both a naive curl client and a Chrome-fingerprinted client. The client mattered first: naive curl was blocked on the hardest sites regardless of IP type. With the fingerprint fixed, the mobile pool passed 99% of requests and the datacenter IP 62%, with four sites hard-blocking the datacenter exit and none blocking mobile. Datacenter remained far faster and cheaper per GB, so the choice is workload-dependent, not absolute. Every command and raw response is in the article so you can reproduce the test against any provider.

Sources

Last verified 2 October 2026. All figures from a single same-day run; the reproduction commands above are the source of truth.

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