Carrier-grade NAT (CGNAT) is a network address translation technique used by mobile carriers and internet service providers to share a single public IPv4 address among hundreds or thousands of devices simultaneously. It is the reason mobile proxy IPs are trusted by virtually every major platform on the internet.
The concept is simple: the world has a limited number of IPv4 addresses (about 4.3 billion), but there are far more internet-connected devices. Mobile carriers solve this by assigning private IP addresses to individual devices and then routing all their traffic through a shared public IP. From the outside, thousands of different phones, tablets, and mobile hotspots all appear to have the same IP address.
This shared architecture is what makes mobile IPs uniquely trustworthy for proxy use. When platforms see traffic from a CGNAT IP, they know that blocking it would affect thousands of legitimate mobile users. As a result, CGNAT IPs enjoy the lowest block rates and highest trust scores of any IP type on the internet.
How It Works
CGNAT operates as a two-layer NAT system. At the first layer, your mobile device receives a private IP address from the carrier (typically in the 10.x.x.x or 100.64.x.x range). This private IP identifies your device within the carrier's internal network but is not visible to the outside internet.
At the second layer, the carrier's CGNAT equipment maps your private IP to one of its public IPv4 addresses. When you make a request to a website, the CGNAT system translates your private address to a public one, forwards your request, receives the response, and routes it back to your specific device. The website only sees the public IP — the same address that potentially thousands of other mobile devices are using at that exact moment.
The carrier keeps track of which private device corresponds to which public address and port combination, so responses get routed correctly. This mapping changes as devices connect and disconnect from the network, which is why mobile IPs naturally rotate — a property that makes them even harder to distinguish from regular mobile users.
This is fundamentally different from datacenter proxies, which are easily detected and blocked because their IP ranges are publicly registered to hosting companies. CGNAT IPs, by contrast, are registered to legitimate mobile carriers and are indistinguishable from the IPs used by millions of real mobile users. Baltic Proxy's 5G connections leverage this exact CGNAT infrastructure from Latvian mobile carriers.
Why It Matters
CGNAT is the single most important reason why mobile proxies outperform every other proxy type in terms of trust and detection avoidance. It creates a natural "crowd camouflage" — your proxy traffic blends in with thousands of real mobile users who share the same public IP address.
This matters practically because it determines your success rate. When scraping, managing accounts, or automating tasks on platforms with anti-bot protection, the IP trust level is the first thing that gets evaluated. CGNAT-based mobile IPs from Baltic Proxy pass this check effortlessly because they are genuine carrier IPs serving real mobile users. Unlike datacenter proxies, which can never replicate this trust regardless of behavioral mimicry, CGNAT-based mobile IPs are trusted at the network architecture level.
CGNAT and IPv6: The Future of Mobile IPs
As IPv6 adoption grows, some predict CGNAT will become unnecessary — each device could have its own unique IPv6 address. However, this transition is far from complete. Most platforms still rely heavily on IPv4 for user identification and trust scoring, and mobile carriers continue to use CGNAT for IPv4 traffic.
Even as IPv6 becomes more common, the trust dynamics that make CGNAT-based mobile IPs valuable are unlikely to change overnight. Platform trust systems are built around years of IPv4 behavioral data. For the foreseeable future, mobile carrier IPs routed through CGNAT will remain the most trusted IP type for proxy users. Baltic Proxy's 5G infrastructure in Riga leverages this proven trust model.
Baltic Proxy operates dedicated 5G mobile proxy infrastructure in Riga, Latvia, delivering carrier-grade mobile IPs with speeds exceeding 80 Mbit/s.