Why rotate, and how often

Why rotate at all?

Three reasons, in order of real importance.

1. Avoid piling requests onto one address. A site that sees 2,000 requests in an hour from the same IP will eventually rate-limit you, whatever the address origin. Spreading the volume changes the signature.
2. Work around a one-off block. A mobile address may have been used by another subscriber in the pool on a sensitive site. A rotation gives you a fresh address within seconds.
3. Match how a mobile line naturally behaves. Carriers assign dynamic addresses, so periodic change is consistent with what the network already does by itself.

Automatic or on-demand rotation?

In practice you combine both: automatic rotation for anonymous collection, manual rotation when a session must stay stable. With us, shared plans rotate automatically (5, 10 or 15 minutes depending on the plan) and dedicated plans rotate on demand.

Sticky session duration

On a shared plan the router assigns you to one phone for a set period: the sticky session. While it runs you keep the same egress address, which lets a session stay coherent. Once the period ends you may be reassigned elsewhere.

The right duration depends on the task. Chaining pages from the same site benefits from staying on one address for a few minutes. An independent page-by-page collection has no reason to stay stuck. Stickiness avoids the different-address-per-request pattern, which is itself a robot signal.

The hidden cost of rotation

Changing address on a mobile line involves a network cycle: cellular disconnect, reattach, new address. It usually takes 5 to 15 seconds and consumes a little signalling data. Rotating every ten seconds is therefore not just useless, it is counterproductive, because your requests land during the gaps.

That is why we apply a cooldown between two manual rotations. It is not a commercial limit: it is protection against scripts that sabotage themselves.

How many requests per address?

There is no magic number, but there is a useful order of magnitude: on French consumer sites, around a hundred spaced requests from a single mobile address generally causes no problem. Beyond a few hundred within a short interval, rate limiting becomes likely. If your target reacts sooner, other signals are at play: headers, pacing, missing cookies.

Tuning rotation from the API

You can trigger a rotation with an authenticated HTTP call, which makes it easy to wire into a pipeline: rotate at the start of a batch, on a 403 or 429, or against a request quota. The customer portal also exposes a button and the rotation history.

Classic mistakes

• Rotating on every request. Expensive, slow and often more suspicious than a stable address.
• Rotating mid-way through an authenticated session. It triggers a security alert on the platform.
• Ignoring the cooldown. Consecutive rotations fail and the script wrongly believes the IP changed.
• Never rotating. The request counter eventually triggers rate limiting.
• Confusing IP rotation with anonymity. The rest of your fingerprint does not change.

In short

Choose the mode that matches the stability your session needs, space rotations out, respect the cooldown and only change address when it helps. If you want to experiment with both modes, the trial includes automatic rotation and dedicated plans include on-demand rotation. The web scraping page details collection best practices.