Are residential IPs really that different from regular VPN IPs?

Questions
1

I’ve been wondering about this after seeing quite a few people complain about streaming sites detecting their VPN, throwing CAPTCHAs at them, or asking them to verify their account more often.

A lot of the advice seems to be “change servers” or “try a different protocol,” but wouldn’t the exit IP itself be a big part of the problem? If hundreds or thousands of people are sharing the same datacenter IP, I’d imagine it becomes pretty easy for services to identify it as VPN traffic.

Has anyone here actually compared this with residential IP routing? Did you notice fewer CAPTCHAs or proxy/VPN detection, and how was the speed and stability?

I’ve been trying one of the DPN/residential routing options myself and haven’t run into many detection issues so far, but that could be just my own experience. Curious if anyone here has tested both for a longer period of time.

2

Yes, companies have a list of IP adress use by datacenter.

They will consider them to be bot or vpnusers.

3

Residential proxys are detectable. https://spur.us

4

I doubt that all of them are, because some are hijacked devices from real citizen.

For example, smart refrigerator, surveillance camera, chineese android tv box.

They will use the same IP adress are the real ISP client,

5

I switched from unprotected internet access to always-on VPN across all devices within the past year. I now experience many more bot-detection barriers

Although >70% are effectively the same - big CDN conglomerates (cloudfare et al) that host much of the public internet

6

Yeah, that makes sense. I guess that’s why I’ve been seeing more people mention residential IP routing as an alternative to the usual shared datacenter VPN IPs. Seems like the exit IP itself matters quite a bit for detection.

7

Definitely. I don’t think residential means undetectable. I’m more curious whether they’re generally less likely to get flagged than heavily shared datacenter VPN IPs, especially for things like CAPTCHAs and streaming.

8

Interesting… especially you noticed the difference after going always-on. Do you usually stick with the same VPN when possible, or rotate between servers? Wonder how much that changes the number of bot checks you get.

9

I think they are not gonna get captchas in the same way when browsing but if its a heavily used one it might get more scrutiny than even a VPN when trying to sign up for things. Every company does it differently.

I’ve been on regular cellular connections that are detected as residential proxies so there’s risk of false positives and it can impact regular users so it’s harder to block.