How Many IPs One SIM Sees in a Month

A common question before renting: how many IPs do I get? The honest answer for a dedicated SIM is that you get one at a time, drawn from a carrier pool in one city, and over a month you will see some number of distinct addresses that depends on how often you rotate and how the carrier behaves. That is a very different product from a pool that advertises millions of addresses, and for most of the work our customers do it is the better one. This article explains where the addresses come from, what you can expect to see over a month, and how to think about depth when you are planning a job.

Where a SIM's addresses come from

Every time the modem holding your SIM opens a data session, the carrier's regional gateway maps it onto one of the public addresses it owns for that metro. The gateway has a finite block of addresses, and it reuses them constantly across all the phones it serves. Your SIM therefore sees addresses from one pool: the one the gateway in your city uses.

How big that pool is varies by carrier and by metro, and carriers do not publish the figure. What we can say from running SIMs across eight cities is that the pool is large enough that rotating a few times a day produces a different address most of the time, and small enough that over a month you will see repeats. Both are normal.

What a month on one SIM looks like

Left alone, a SIM changes address rarely, usually when the carrier resets the session or the modem reconnects after a tower handover. A customer who never rotates might see a handful of addresses over a month. A customer who rotates between every job might see several dozen distinct addresses, with some of them appearing more than once. Rotating many times an hour does not multiply that number much, because you are cycling through the same pool faster and the gateway hands back addresses it recently gave you.

The addresses are all carrier addresses in your city, all shared with real subscribers, and all carrying whatever reputation the crowd behind them has. There is no hidden premium pool; there is the carrier's pool, and your SIM is one of many devices drawing from it.

Why depth is the wrong measure for most work

Pool size matters when every request needs to look like a different person and the job is measured in requests per hour. That is a scraping shape, and some scraping does fine on a dedicated SIM, but it is not what the SIM is for. The SIM is for work measured in identities: accounts, profiles, routines, monitors. For those, the question is not how many addresses you can touch, it is whether the address you have today is still yours tomorrow, and on a dedicated SIM the answer is yes.

Put differently, a pool gives you many addresses you share with other customers; a SIM gives you one address at a time that you share only with ordinary phones. The second is what makes a platform comfortable.

• Accounts and profiles: one SIM each, rotate rarely, depth irrelevant
• Verification and checks by city: one SIM per metro, rotate between runs
• Steady collection from one site: one SIM, rotate between batches, expect repeats
• High-volume scraping across many sites: not what a dedicated SIM is built for

Planning a job that does need several addresses

If a job genuinely needs more distinct addresses than one SIM supplies, the clean answer is more SIMs, each on its own modem, in the cities the job covers. Two SIMs on different carriers in one city draw from two different pools, so they never overlap. Two SIMs on the same carrier in two cities draw from two regional pools, again no overlap. This also keeps identities apart, because nothing done on one SIM touches the record of another.

What we do not recommend is treating one SIM as a rotation machine and spinning it every minute. You will see repeats, the modem spends its time reconnecting instead of carrying traffic, and the pattern itself looks nothing like a phone.

Repeats are not a fault

Seeing an address come back after rotating is the carrier doing its job. The gateway gives out whatever is free, and an address you released a few minutes ago is often free. A repeat does not mean your rotation failed or that the SIM is stuck. If you need a different address right now, rotate again; if you need an address you have never used, that is not something any mobile line can guarantee.

What to expect, in one paragraph

One address at a time, from the carrier's pool in your city, shared with real phones. A handful of changes a month if you leave the SIM alone, a few dozen if you rotate between jobs, with repeats either way. Enough for every identity-shaped job we see, and the wrong shape for jobs that want a thousand addresses an hour. If you are not sure which shape your job is, write to us before you rent and we will tell you straight.

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