We ran a query across IPinfo’s Places dataset and our Residential Proxy detection data to find out: what percentage of public WiFi IPs at real-world venues are also tagged as residential proxy exit nodes?
The results paint an interesting picture of how residential proxy traffic distributes across different types of public places.
What we looked at
IPinfo Places maps IP addresses to physical locations — airports, hotels, libraries, stadiums, and 30+ other venue categories. Our residential proxy dataset tracks IPs that are actively used as exit nodes by commercial proxy services. We joined the two datasets and calculated the overlap rate for each venue category.
Key findings
Over half of hotel WiFi IPs overlap with residential proxy networks. Hotels top the list at 53.62%, which makes sense. Guests stay for hours or days on personal devices, many of which run apps with embedded proxy SDKs. The combination of long sessions and personal devices creates ideal conditions for proxy providers.
Transit locations have the lowest overlap. Subways (32.35%), trains (37.79%), and in-transit networks (28.33%) all sit near the bottom. Passengers cycle through quickly, connections are brief, and the short session windows give proxy services less opportunity to route meaningful traffic.
Airplanes are the clear outlier at 6.89%. In-flight WiFi is architecturally different — captive portals, satellite backhaul, and highly managed network environments make these IPs far less useful as proxy endpoints.
Leisure venues cluster around 43-50%. Bars (48.42%), music venues (50.25%), casinos (43.14%), and stadiums (43.26%) all land in a similar range. These are places where people relax on personal devices with personal apps — exactly the kind of environment where proxy SDKs operate.
Car dealers lead at 60.2%. This was a surprise at first, but the pattern is clear. Customers sit in service waiting areas for hours, connected to the dealer’s WiFi on personal phones. Long dwell time, personal device, and relatively unsophisticated network management.
Coworking spaces are surprisingly low at 26.46%. Despite all-day sessions, the overlap is well below average. Possible factors: more sophisticated network configurations, higher VPN usage masking underlying IPs, and a tech-savvy user base less likely to have proxy SDK-laden apps.
The dwell time connection
There’s a strong correlation between how long people typically stay at a venue and how likely its WiFi IPs are to appear in residential proxy networks. This isn’t coincidental. Residential proxy services rely on sustained connections to route traffic through exit nodes. A device connected for 15 minutes at a subway station simply isn’t as useful as one connected for 4 hours at a hotel or car dealership.
The exception that proves the rule is airplanes — long dwell time but extremely low overlap. The controlled network environment and captive portal architecture override the dwell time effect.
What this means
For fraud detection and ad verification teams, these numbers offer a practical signal. A login attempt from a hotel WiFi IP has a roughly 1-in-2 chance of passing through a residential proxy network. The same attempt from a subway station? Closer to 1-in-3. And from in-flight WiFi? Under 1-in-14.
For network operators at public venues, this data highlights how much of their WiFi traffic may be serving as proxy infrastructure — often without the venue’s knowledge.
This analysis used IPinfo’s Places API and Residential Proxy Detection data, joined on matching IP addresses across both datasets. The Places dataset covers 33 venue categories. The residential proxy dataset tracks IPs verified as active exit nodes across ~100 commercial proxy providers.