A Dedicated Texas Line, or Mobile Traffic by the Gigabyte?

If you need a Texas mobile address, there are two ways to pay for it. You can rent one carrier SIM in our Houston rack for a flat daily, weekly or monthly price and use it as much as the fair-use rule allows. Or you can buy access to a large shared pool of mobile or residential addresses and pay for every gigabyte that passes through. Both are legitimate products. They fit different jobs, and this page lays out the difference without pretending one is always right.

How each one is sold

A dedicated line from us is one AT&T, T-Mobile or Verizon SIM in one device we own in Houston, used by you alone for the length of the plan. You pay $5 a day, $28 a week or $65 a month on 4G LTE, or $6, $31 or $75 on 5G, and you can test for $2 or $3 for the first two hours. There is no meter. Rotation is unlimited. You get the SIM's whole history and nothing anyone else did.

A metered pool is sold by the gigabyte. As of autumn 2026 the going rate for mobile pool traffic runs from roughly ten to twenty-five dollars a gigabyte depending on the provider and the commitment, with residential pools somewhat cheaper. You get a gateway login and the pool picks an address for each request or session from whatever devices or apps happen to be online, in whatever state you asked for. You share every address with every other customer of the pool.

The cost of a month of Texas work

The arithmetic is simple once you know your volume. A monthly 4G line is $65 however much you use it. A metered pool at fifteen dollars a gigabyte costs $65 at a little over four gigabytes. Modern web pages are heavy: a listing site with photos, an ad verification run with video, a session of app testing, each can move hundreds of megabytes. A single working day of real browsing can be a gigabyte or more. If you do that every weekday, the pool costs several hundred dollars a month for the same work the line does for $65.

The pool wins on cost only when your traffic is tiny: a few API calls, a few lightweight pages a day, a job that touches Texas once a week. Then a few dollars of gigabytes is cheaper than a plan. Be honest about your volume before choosing.

Control: knowing what is on the other end

With a dedicated line you know the carrier, the generation, the device and the city, and they do not change unless you change them. You can hold an address for a whole session because the carrier is the only thing that ends it. You can rotate exactly when your job wants to, from the dashboard, a rotation link, the API or a timer, with no waiting. You can tunnel a whole phone through it with VLESS. The line behaves the same on Monday as it did on Friday.

With a pool you know the state you asked for and little else. The address for your next request might be a phone in Houston, a tablet in El Paso or an SDK buried in a free app somewhere in the state. Sticky sessions are a fixed window, after which the gateway moves you whether or not your login is finished. That is fine for stateless scraping. It is awkward for anything that involves being the same visitor for an afternoon.

Trust: whose history are you carrying

Both products give you carrier-owned addresses, and both are shared through carrier NAT with ordinary subscribers, so the baseline trust of the address itself is similar. The difference is the device. On a dedicated line, the SIM's history is yours alone: every login, every rotation, every session on it was you. On a pool, the address you get was used minutes ago by another customer whose work you know nothing about, and the device behind it may be a consumer app rotating through many customers an hour.

Platforms that score sessions, rather than just addresses, notice this. A stable device-plus-address pattern looks like a person. A device that was ten different customers this morning looks like a pool, because it is one. For Texas business accounts, seller accounts and anything that logs in, the dedicated line is the safer footing. For reading public pages, it matters much less.

Coverage: one city against the whole state

Here the pool has a genuine advantage, and we will not pretend otherwise. Our Texas hardware is one rack in Houston. A Houston line geolocates as Houston or Texas, which covers every state-level gate, but it does not read as Dallas, Austin or San Antonio. A large pool may have devices online in those cities and can sometimes give you a Dallas-metro address on request, though it depends on what is online at that moment and you cannot hold it for long. If your job is strictly about a city-level IP reading in a Texas city other than Houston, a pool might serve it and we cannot.

For jobs that need Texas rather than a particular Texas city, which is most of them, the Houston line is the better and cheaper instrument.

Which to choose for which job

Take the dedicated Houston line for daily Texas work: running Texas-registered accounts, verifying Texas ad campaigns, QA on Houston and Texas listings, pricing and availability checks for travel and tickets, app testing on real AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon networks, and monitoring that runs every day. Take a metered pool for very light touch work, for jobs that need many states in the same hour, or for a one-off spot check where a plan would be overkill. Some teams sensibly run both: a line for the serious Texas work and a small pool budget for everything else.

• Daily or heavy Texas use: dedicated line, flat price
• Logged-in accounts and long sessions: dedicated line
• App testing on a real carrier path: dedicated line
• Tiny volume, occasional checks: metered pool
• Many states at once: metered pool
• City-level reading outside Houston: a pool may manage it; we cannot

Trying the line for the price of a coffee

An hourly test is $2 on 4G or $3 on 5G for the first two hours, up to four hours, and never renews. Run your real job on it for an afternoon, look at the data counter in your own tools, and multiply by a pool's per-gigabyte price. That number, more than anything on this page, will tell you which product you should be paying for. If a line is wrong for you after buying, a cancellation within 24 hours is refunded in full.

Questions about per-GB pricing