IP Pool Depth on a Los Angeles Mobile Line

The question arrives in different clothes: how big is the pool, how many IPs do I get, how often will I see the same address twice. They are all the same question, and the honest answer is more interesting than a number. A dedicated Los Angeles line does not come with a pool we own; it draws from the carrier's regional pool, which is large, shared with real subscribers, and not under anyone's control but the carrier's. This article explains what that pool is, how rotation on a California Proxies line interacts with it, why you will see repeats, and how to measure the depth yourself for the carrier and the job you care about.

Whose pool it is

AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon each run a block of public addresses for the Los Angeles region and place subscribers behind them with carrier-grade NAT. When a device registers, it is assigned one of those public addresses for the life of the session. When the session ends and a new one starts, the device may get the same address back or a different one, depending on what the carrier's gateway has free. Our modem is one such device. Your line's address is whichever one the carrier assigned to that modem's current session.

That is why we will not quote you a pool size. We do not own the pool and cannot count it from the outside with any honesty. What we can tell you is that the LA region is one of the largest mobile markets in the country, that each carrier keeps a correspondingly large block for it, and that in day-to-day use the pool is deep enough that a line rotating every few minutes for a working day sees mostly distinct addresses with the occasional repeat.

How rotation draws from it

When you rotate from the dashboard, the rotation link, the API or a timer, the modem drops its session and registers again. The carrier gateway assigns an address from what it has free at that moment. Rotation is unlimited and there is no wait we impose between changes, but the draw is the carrier's, not ours, and it has a few habits. Addresses recently released tend to come back sooner. Some gateways keep a device on the same address across short reconnects. And the set of addresses one modem can draw from is a slice of the regional block, not the entire block.

In practice this means the sequence of addresses you see over a day looks like a shuffle of a few hundred to a few thousand values with occasional returns, not a counter that never repeats. The carrier can also change your address on its own schedule, which to you looks like a free rotation you did not ask for.

Why repeats happen and why they are fine

People sometimes see the same address twice in an hour and assume something is wrong. Nothing is. A repeat means the carrier gateway handed back an address it had free, which is what gateways do. For almost every job a dedicated line is bought for, a repeat is harmless: an account that sees an address it used earlier today sees nothing unusual, because that is how phones behave, and a store-locator sweep that lands on an address it already used simply gets one more sample from the same place.

The jobs where repeats matter are the ones that need a strictly new address for every request, usually high-volume scraping. A carrier pool is the wrong tool for that regardless of depth, because the point of a carrier address is trust, not volume. If you need thousands of distinct addresses an hour, you want a different kind of product, and we would rather say so than sell you a line for it.

Depth by carrier and by speed tier

The three LA carriers behave a little differently without any of them being the obvious winner. T-Mobile tends to reassign quickly on rotation and shows a wide spread of addresses across a day. AT&T often keeps a modem on the same address across short reconnects, so it is the stickiest of the three and its day-long spread is narrower. Verizon sits between them and has the largest block, which is why its addresses sometimes read as California generally rather than Los Angeles specifically. 4G and 5G lines draw from the same regional blocks, so the speed tier does not change the depth you see.

None of that is fixed. Carriers rebalance blocks, add capacity and change gateway behaviour without telling anyone. What was true of a carrier last month is a good guess for this month and nothing more, which is another reason we do not publish a number.

Measure it yourself

The only pool-depth figure that matters is the one for your carrier, your rotation interval and your job, and you can get it in an afternoon on the hourly plan. The method is simple: rotate on a fixed interval, record the address after each rotation, and count distinct addresses against total rotations.

1. Buy an hourly line on the carrier you are considering. $2 gets two hours on 4G, which is enough for a meaningful sample.
2. From a script or a terminal, loop: call the rotation link from your dashboard, wait for the interval you plan to use in production, fetch a plain IP-echo page through the proxy, and append the address with a timestamp to a file.
3. Run the loop for the full session. At a two-minute interval you will collect around sixty samples; at thirty seconds, more.
4. Count distinct addresses and compare to the number of rotations. Also note how far apart repeats were and whether the geolocation of any address read outside California.
5. Repeat on a second carrier if the first result is not what the job needs. Moving the plan between carriers is free from the dashboard.

What it means for planning

For account work, pool depth barely matters; you want sticky, and a carrier address that stays put for hours is exactly right. For verification sweeps and location checks, depth matters moderately; a few hundred distinct addresses in a day across one line is plenty, and running two lines on two carriers doubles the spread and the trust. For anything that needs a strictly new address per request at volume, a carrier line is the wrong shape, however deep the pool.

If you are unsure which of those describes your job, run the measurement above and look at the ratio of distinct addresses to rotations. If it is comfortably high at the interval you plan to use, you are fine. If the job needs it to be one for one with no repeats, write to [email protected] and tell us what you are trying to do; we will tell you plainly whether a Los Angeles line is the right tool.

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