A Dedicated NYC Carrier Line vs Paying per Gigabyte

There are two ways to get a New York mobile address. You can rent a carrier SIM in a device that is yours for the term, at a flat price, which is what we sell. Or you can buy traffic through a pool of other people's devices, metered by the gigabyte, which is what the large proxy networks sell. Both are legitimate products and each is better for some jobs. This page lays out the differences as plainly as we can, using our real prices and the market's typical per-gigabyte rates as of autumn 2026.

What each one actually is

A dedicated line is one Verizon, AT&T or T-Mobile SIM in one modem or phone in Brooklyn, Queens or Manhattan, used by you alone. You know the carrier, you know the device, you can rotate it when you like and keep it still when you like, and nobody else's traffic ever shares your SIM. The address is a carrier address that reads as New York City.

A per-gigabyte pool is a network of devices, usually ordinary people's phones and home routers running an SDK or an app, that forward traffic for the network. You ask the gateway for a New York address and it routes your request through whichever device is available there. You do not control the device, you share it with other customers of the network, and the address you get on the next request may be a different device entirely. You pay for the bytes that pass through.

Cost: a month of real use

Our monthly line is $65 on 4G or $75 on 5G, with no meter on data under the fair-use rule. Per-gigabyte mobile and residential traffic is typically priced somewhere between roughly ten and twenty-five dollars a gigabyte, as of autumn 2026, with mobile pools at the top of that range. A job that moves a few hundred megabytes a month, such as checking listings and logging into a handful of accounts, is cheap either way. A job that moves ten or twenty gigabytes, which a browser session with images and video reaches faster than people expect, costs more on a pool than a whole month of a line.

The crossover is low. Somewhere around three to six gigabytes a month, a dedicated line is already cheaper, and past that the gap widens every gigabyte. A day pass at $5 or $6 or a week at $28 or $31 makes the same comparison for short jobs.

Control and consistency

With a line, the address you have at nine in the morning is the address you have at five in the evening unless you or the carrier change it, and on Verizon in Brooklyn the carrier rarely does. That is what account work needs. With a pool, stickiness is a feature the network offers for a limited window, after which the session moves to another device, and the device you were on may drop off the network when its owner closes the app. The pool is built for breadth, not for sitting still.

With a line you also know what is behind you: a modem with no browser history, or a phone we provisioned. With a pool, the device belongs to someone whose other activity you cannot see, and other customers of the network may have been through the same device and the same address earlier that hour.

Location honesty

We say our hardware is in Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan because it is, and we say the address reads as New York City because that is what geolocation databases return for the carrier's downstate pool. A pool labels its devices by the geolocation of the address they happen to have, and that label is only as good as the database and the moment. In our experience a request for a New York address from a pool sometimes returns a device that geolocates to the suburbs or to a neighbouring state, because the carrier's regional gateway covers more than the city and the database draws the line somewhere. A line from us never does that, because we check every line's address against the databases before it goes into stock.

Where the pool wins

Breadth. If your job needs a thousand different New York addresses in an hour, each used for one request, a pool does that and a line does not; a line gives you one address at a time and a new one when you ask. Short, bursty scraping of public pages across many sites is what pools are designed for, and a dedicated line would be a waste there. Pools also give you many cities from one login, which does not interest someone who needs New York but matters to someone who needs everywhere.

• Pool: many addresses at once, one request each, public pages, many cities
• Line: one address you control, long sessions, accounts, testing, verification, unmetered volume

Where the line wins

Anything with an account. Anything that should look like one person on one phone for an hour or a day. Anything that moves real data, from video-heavy pages to app testing to a long research session, because the meter never runs. Anything where you need to know the carrier, because Verizon and AT&T behave differently and some jobs are about that difference. Anything where you need to be sure the hardware is where you were told. And anything where the bill should be a number you know in advance.

Using both

Plenty of our customers do. They run a pool for wide, shallow collection and keep two or three of our lines for the accounts, the verification and the testing that need a stable, known New York connection. That is a sensible split and we would not talk anyone out of it. What we would talk you out of is running account work through a pool because the per-gigabyte price looked small, and then wondering why the account keeps meeting challenges from an address that changed under it.

Trying it

The hourly test is $2 for the first two hours on 4G or $3 on 5G, up to four hours, and it never renews. Point your actual job at it and compare with what you get from a pool. Sign up at nyc.newyorkproxies.com/register; support is at [email protected] or @NewYorkProxiesBot if you want an opinion on which fits before you spend anything.

Questions about per-GB pricing