A mobile proxy sends your traffic through a real smartphone-network IP. To the target site you look like an ordinary phone on a carrier — the hardest category of IP to block, because collateral damage to real users is high. That single property is why mobile proxies are the default for serious scraping of protected targets.
Why mobile beats datacenter and residential for scraping
Datacenter IPs are cheap and fast but trivially fingerprinted — their ranges are public and sites block them wholesale. Residential IPs are better but still tied to fixed households. Mobile IPs sit at the top: carriers use CGNAT, so one IP is shared by many real subscribers, and blocking it risks blocking paying customers. Sites therefore tolerate far more traffic from mobile ranges before acting.
Rotating vs dedicated: which for scraping
For broad crawling, a rotating mobile proxy that changes IP on a timer or per request spreads your footprint across many IPs — ideal for high-volume, low-per-target work. For scraping that must hold a session (a logged-in area, a multi-step flow), a dedicated mobile proxy with a sticky IP and on-demand rotation is the right tool. Many scrapers use both: rotating for discovery, dedicated for session work.