5G or 4G: Picking the Tier for the Job

5G Proxies USA sells the same thing in two tiers. Both are one dedicated US carrier line in hardware we own, with unlimited data, unlimited rotation and a real T-Mobile, Verizon or AT&T address. The difference is the radio: a 5G-capable modem camped on the carrier's fast 5G layer, or a 4G LTE modem. The 5G tier costs a dollar more per day, four dollars more per week and ten dollars more per month. This page lays out exactly what that money changes, what it does not change at all, and which jobs are worth it, with our own prices and nothing invented.

Two tiers, one kind of line

Start with what is identical, because it is most of the product. Whichever tier you buy, you get one SIM from a US carrier, installed in a device we own in one of our eight cities, used by you and nobody else for the term. You get HTTP(S) and SOCKS5 endpoints, UDP over SOCKS5, rotation by link, API, timer or button, sticky sessions for as long as the carrier keeps them, free moves between cities, and a human on support at any hour. The address a website sees is a carrier address of the cellular type either way.

The 5G tier adds a modem that registers on the carrier's 5G layers, T-Mobile's mid-band n41, Verizon's C-band n77 or AT&T's 5G where it is live, and falls back to 4G LTE when the signal or the tower says so. The 4G tier is an LTE modem that stays on LTE. That is the entire difference in hardware. Everything else that follows on this page is a consequence of it.

What changes: throughput, latency, parallel threads

Throughput is the headline. On a strong 5G signal a line delivers 50 Mbps and up; a 4G line usually sits at 20 to 45 Mbps. For a single small request the difference is invisible. For a workload that moves real volume, a video manifest and its segments, a page with several megabytes of images and scripts, a batch of downloads, the 5G line finishes sooner and keeps finishing sooner as you add work.

Latency is the quieter change. The 5G layers cut the round trip to the first byte compared with LTE, which matters for anything interactive: driving a browser through a flow, measuring how fast a page becomes usable, or hitting an API that is sensitive to timing. Parallel threads are where the two tiers diverge most. An LTE channel starts to feel crowded with a handful of simultaneous connections; a mid-band or C-band 5G channel is wide enough that a browser with many tabs, or a scraper with a dozen workers, shares it without each thread slowing the others to a crawl.

What does not change: trust, rotation, carrier NAT

A 5G address is not more trusted than a 4G address. Both come from the same carrier ranges, under the same AS numbers, with the same cellular connection type, and both sit behind the same carrier-grade NAT shared with thousands of phones. A site scoring your traffic cannot tell which tier you bought, and it would not care if it could. If your problem is being treated as a bot, the fix is behavior on a dedicated line, not more bandwidth.

Rotation is identical too. Both tiers rotate on demand without limit, both pull a new address from the same regional pool, and both hold a sticky address for as long as the carrier keeps the session. Geolocation is the same, because it depends on the gateway, not on the radio. Data is unlimited on both, subject to the same fair-use rule against bulk transfer. And both tiers are sold by the hour, day, week and month in every city we run.

Worked examples by job type

Media and streaming QA. You are checking that a player picks the right bitrate ladder on a US cellular connection and that segments arrive without stalls. The point of the test is the fast case, so the 5G tier is the right buy; a 4G line would show you how the player behaves on a constrained link, which is a different test. Buy 5G by the day at $7 and move between cities to compare carriers and gateways.

Large downloads and asset pulls. You need to pull full page bundles, app packages or image sets from a US cellular address for comparison. Volume per hour is the limiting factor and the 5G tier roughly removes the wait. If the pull is a one-off, the hourly 5G option at $3 for the first two hours is the cheapest way to do it.

Page checks and price checks. A few hundred lightweight requests an hour from a US carrier address, where what matters is the location and the carrier label. A 4G line at $6 a day does this perfectly; you would not notice the 5G line's extra headroom, and over a month the $10 difference buys nothing you use.

Logins and account work. Signing in, posting, replying, managing a profile from a stable address in a browser profile. Requests are small and sessions are long. The 4G tier is enough. The one case that tips it to 5G is heavy media uploads: if the work is video uploads all day, the wider channel pays for itself in time.

When 4G is the right buy

Buy the 4G tier when the job is about where the address is and what carrier it belongs to rather than how much it moves. Geo checks, ad verification on text and display placements, search result captures, account maintenance, light scraping, API calls, anything where a single request is small and the count is modest. Buy it when you are running many lines and the total matters: at $75 a month per line, ten 4G lines cost $100 a month less than ten 5G lines, and for request-light work you would see no difference. Buy it when the city you need has a weak 5G signal for your carrier, which support will tell you honestly if you ask.

When 5G is the right buy

Buy the 5G tier when throughput or concurrency is the job. Video and audio QA, adaptive bitrate testing, large asset pulls, browser automation with many tabs, multi-threaded crawlers, any test that measures time to first byte or page speed from a cellular connection, and anything you have already tried on 4G where the line was the bottleneck. Buy it when the extra cost is small next to the time it saves: a dollar a day is less than a minute of anyone's working time. And buy it when you need a 5G-capable line on purpose, for example to confirm that a site serves a different experience to 5G devices.

Every number on one line

5G tier: $7 per day, $35 per week, $85 per month; hourly, $3 for the first two hours and $3 per extra hour. 4G tier: $6 per day, $31 per week, $75 per month; hourly, $2 for the first two hours and $2 per extra hour. Hourly purchases are limited to four hours each, never renew on their own, and the hours already paid count toward the day price if you keep the line all day. Both tiers: one dedicated carrier line, unlimited data under fair use, unlimited rotation, HTTP(S) and SOCKS5, free city moves, eight US cities, T-Mobile, Verizon and AT&T subject to stock. Speeds: 5G 50 Mbps and up on a good signal, 4G usually 20 to 45 Mbps. Unsure which tier fits? Describe the job to [email protected] and we will say which one to buy, including when the answer is the cheaper one.

Questions about per-GB pricing