Mobile Proxy FAQs

Find answers to common questions about integrating, configuring, and using Bright Data’s Mobile proxy products, including IP types, geotargeting, and error codes.

Where does Bright Data have proxies?

Bright Data offers proxies in every country in the world, except in the following countries:

• Iran

• Iraq

• Syria

• Lebanon

• Palestine

• North Korea

• Cuba

• Sudan

• Crimea region of Russia

If you need proxies from there countries, unfortunately Bright Data will not be able to help you.

How to browse Chinese sites by using Chinese Residentials IPs

When outside of China
Targeting Chinese Residential IP peers is enough:

curl --proxy brd.superproxy.io:33335 --proxy-user brd-customer-<customer_id>-zone-<zone_name>-country-cn:<zone_password> "<target_site>"

Carrier-specific Proxy peer IP

• You can choose to use a specific carrier from this list:

a1, aircel, airtel, att, celcom, chinamobile, claro, comcast, cox, digi, 
dt, docomo, dtac, etisalat, idea, kyivstar, meo, megafon, mtn, mtnza, mts,
optus, orange, qwest, reliance_jio, robi, sprint, telefonica, telstra, 
tmobile, tigo, tim, verizon, vimpelcom, vodacomza, vodafone, vivo, zain,
vivabo, telenormyanmar, kcelljsc, swisscom, singtel, asiacell, windit, 
cellc, ooredoo, drei, umobile, cableone, proximus,tele2, mobitel, o2, 
bouygues, free, sfr, digicel

• For Example

Deutsche Telekom

brd-customer-<customer_id>-zone-<zone_name>-carrier-dt

About geolocation databases, and how to check the proxy IP information?

Geolocation databases (GeoDB) are used by internet websites to query information about the IP address used by the users. Bright Data monitors and maintains correct records of the 4 main GeoDBs used today: Maxmind, ip2location, db-ip and Google.

There are many other smaller GeoDBs, most of which are using outdated records or flawed testing methods, and so the information they present is not accurate or is presented to lure their viewers to buy VPN or proxy products from them. Therefore, we highly recommend using the GeoDBs mentioned above when testing your IPs.

In order to see our information about the proxy IP that you are using, browse one of the following:

• https://lumtest.com/echo.json

• https://www.iplocation.net

• https://www.maxmind.com/en/geoip-demo

Which Bright Data products are best for scraping search engines (SERPs)?

For single-step scraping:

SERP API is the ideal product for targeting SERPs as it has a guaranteed success rate (pay only for success) with active unlocking, automatically chooses the best proxies, customizes headers, fingerprinting, solves CAPTCHAs, and more.

For multi-step scraping (playwright/puppeteer/selenium):

Browser API is the ideal product as it is our fully cloud-hosted browser designed to help you easily focus on your multi-step data collection while we take care of the full proxy and unblocking infrastructure for you, including CAPTCHA solving.

Can I target Google SERPs from the Residential, Datacenter, or ISP Proxy network?

Residential Proxy - No, SERP API is the ideal product for targeting SERPs as it has a guaranteed success rate (pay only for success) with active unlocking, automatically chooses the best proxies, customizes headers, fingerprinting, solves CAPTCHAs, and more. Targeting Google SERPs from the Residential network will result in Super-proxy bypass, which will casue the request to be sent from our servers instead of the peer.

Datacenter & ISP Proxies - No. When attempting to specifically target Google through either of these proxy networks, your request will be denied and you will receive the following error message in the response headers:

HTTP/1.1 403 Search engine host is not allowed
X-Luminati-Error: Forbidden: This target URL isn't supported on proxy networks, use the SERP API product for targeting this URL. You may contact your account manager or open a support ticket for assistance

Does Bright Data support the Socks5 protocol

Yes. Bright data supports SOCKS5 protocol, with a default port 22228 assigned for SOCKS5 communication.

See here for full SOCKS5 configuration instructions or visit the SOCKS5 proxies page.

What is Error code 502?

HTTP error code 502 means “Bad Gateway”. This error occurs when you send a request to a URL, but the URL’s server receives an invalid response from another server that it depends on to fulfill the request.

Possible causes

• We currently do have not matching peers for your zone’s configuration, as they might already be in use with a different client, or unavailable for other reasons.

• The connection has been timed out due to inactivity.

• The connection has been closed by the host (target URL) side

Sample error 502 response

Request URL: SAMPLE_URL Request method: GET ***Status code: 502***  
Super proxy IP: IP  
Username: brd-customer-customer_id-zone-zone_name-country  
Password: zone_password  
Sent from: 127.0.0.1  
Response headers  
connection: keep-alive  
date: Tue, 14 Feb 2023 08:49:16 GMT  
keep-alive: timeout=5  
transfer-encoding: chunked  
x-lpm-port: 24000  
x-luminati-error: waiting for selector ".price-container" failed: timeout 90000ms exceeded  
***x-luminati-error-code: expect_element***  
x-request-id2: REQUEST_ID  
Request headers  
user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36(KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/110.0.0.0 Safari/537.36  
host: SAMPLE_HOST  
accept-encoding: gzip, deflate  
Connection: keep-alive

What is Error code 403?

HTTP 403 response code means you are forbidden from accessing a valid URL.

The server understands the request, but it can’t fulfill the request because of client-side issues.

Possible causes

• Your machine IP is not whitelisted. In order to learn how to whitelist an IP, please review the following article.

• The domain you try to access is blocked by Bright Data.

• The domain you try to access is not specified in your use case.

• Failed captcha response (relevant for Web Unlocker and SERP API).

• The domain you tried to access is blocked by the Target host settings of your zone (check your proxy zone’s Access Parameters)

Sample error 403 response

< HTTP/1.1 403 response status was rejected  
< x-debug-req-id: SAMPLE_ID  
< X-Luminati-Error: response status was rejected: 403 Forbidden  
< X-Luminati-Error-Code: http_status  
< Date: Wed, 22 Feb 2023 11:11:23 GMT  
< Connection: keep-alive  
< Keep-Alive: timeout=5  
< Transfer-Encoding: chunked

The 403 X-luminati-error (Forbidden) indicates you are targeting a domain that is not allowed by Bright Data 
This can be resolved by contacting the Bright data compliance team for approval.
As the Bright data compliance team reviews your use case and confirms - you will be informed that access is been added.
For better handling, it is advised to add your account manager to the ticket and inform him as well for your requirement 

When error message:

You tried to target <host> but got blocked

Appears, contact the Bright data compliance team ([e-mail]) or from the ticketing system 

Our compliance team will review your request to gain access to the particular domain

What devices and network does mobile proxies have?

Bright Data mobile proxies are real mobile devices connected to a real mobile network (not a personal or public wifi).

When issuing a request, in the response header we populate the field x-brd-ip with the gIP or the proxy used (masked hash which we use to distinguish proxies and protect our peers’ real IP address), for mobile proxies this field will have the letter “m” as prefix.