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In this guide, we’ll be looking deeper into the residential upstream PacketStream and some of the technical specifics of the provider. PacketStream is our joint cheapest provider. At face value, PacketStream offers a value-oriented residential proxy.

Company Overview

Launched in 2018, PacketStream prides itself on offering a robust peer-to-peer residential proxy network. Based in the United States, PacketStream continues to offer some of the cheapest residential proxies around, with a pool of 7M proxies from 100 countries.

IP Availability and Supply

Unlike other providers, PacketStream does not publish IP availability per country. Instead, it provides the information that “all major countries” are supported. It’s important to note that IP availability could be geo-limited, as only 100 countries are supported.

PacketStreams IPs are sourced from their own opt-in, peer-to-peer network. Aptly naming their providers “Packeters”.

Proxy Speed and Performance

We tested each residential provider so that you don't need to. Rampage endeavours to create fair, thorough, and reproducible tests to ensure each provider can be compared against another. Please note, your results may vary based on your individual factors when setting up.

Using a server hosted in a German data centre, we tested 10,000 rotating proxies across 5 popular locations. These locations were picked to represent popular locations and give global coverage. The locations we used to test all providers were the following:

• United States of America
• United Kingdom
• Canada
• Germany
• Hong Kong

Our testing suite checks the proxy connection against IpInfo to remain as impartial as possible. We use the information collected from the request, along with IP enrichment data from IpInfo to provide a clear picture of the proxy.

In addition to the usual metrics, we have provided the standard deviation of the response times. A smaller standard deviation suggests that the scores are tightly clustered around the mean, indicating greater consistency or precision in the measurements.

Finally, this script also records the number of unique IP addresses per region tested, as this can be used as a judgement for the diversity of the IP pool. Here’s the results from the tests of PacketStream:

Country	Proxies Tested	Total Success	Total Fails	Success Percentage	Total Unique IP's	Fastest Speed	Lowest Speed	Average Speed	Standard Deviation
US	10,000	7633	2367	76.33%	2616	1.22 seconds	15.10 seconds	5.41 seconds	1.66 seconds
GB	10,000	8877	1123	88.77%	450	1.62 seconds	18.79 seconds	5.89 seconds	1.54 seconds
CA	10,000	8565	1435	85.65%	244	2.68 seconds	19.00 seconds	5.94 seconds	1.95 seconds
DE	10,000	5865	4135	58.65%	1867	1.59 seconds	16.84 seconds	6.44 seconds	2.72 seconds
HK	10,000	8700	1300	87.00%	188	2.94 seconds	15.89 seconds	6.43 seconds	1.65 seconds

Finally, we’ve collected the averages across all 5 geo’s:

• Fastest Proxy Speed: 2.01 seconds
• Lowest Proxy Speed: 17.12 seconds
• Average Proxy Speed: 6.02 seconds
• Standard Deviation: 1.9 seconds
• Success Rate: 79.28%

Location and Targeting Options

As with most providers around this price point, PacketStream's only geo-location capabilities are by country. There is no precision targeting available with PacketStream. Covering only 100 countries, while PacketStream claim to cover all large locations, we cannot guarantee worldwide coverage.

Rotation

As per our dashboard, these proxies can be generated in both static and rotating varieties from a mix of pre-set country pools at no extra charge. The session time for static proxies for PacketStream is up to 30 minutes; however, due to the dynamic nature of these proxies, we cannot guarantee the sessions are active at that time.

PacketStream does not support the protocols SOCKS or UDP through Rampage.

Pricing

PacketStream joins the other value offering of Rampage Core at the bottom of the pricing structure for Rampage’s offerings, sitting at $1 per gigabyte for both rampage proxies and rampage retail subscribers.

Here's how PacketStream stacks up pricing wise, compared to the other providers on the dashboard:

All other provider pricing can be found here.

Suggested Use Cases

Similar to Rampage Core, we recommend PacketStream for those sites which are lower security or which consume a very large volume of traffic.

Here’s a non-exhaustive list of what PacketStream residential proxies could be used for:

• Social Media Marketing: use residential IPs to manage your social media accounts and grow your brand. Use geolocated IPs to give insights into what's going on around the world on social platforms.
• Brand Protection: monitor the web for improper uses of intellectual property and trademarks and see exactly what a normal user would see from their home connection.
• Content Verification: anonymously view landing pages from residential IPs without being cloaked to ensure they don't contain malware or improper advertising.

Pros and Cons

Pros of PacketStream

The biggest strength of PacketStream is the value it offers compared to the other providers in Rampage. For such prices, it offers much wider IP availability than other options at this price point. This makes it perfect for those looking for the best value or those who experience large amounts of bandwidth usage without being able to use DC/ISP proxies.

Cons of PacketStream

As with all positives, there are also negatives. PacketStreams 's smaller IP pool compared to other providers may leave them a second choice when searching for diversity. The lack of complete “world-wide” coverage may also put PacketStream at a disadvantage when being considered for residential proxy use.

During testing, PacketStream also scored the worst success rate of all providers tested, leaving questions of reliability across

Executive Summary

Positioned as one of the cost-effective options in the market, PacketStream offers a pool of 7 million proxies spanning 100 countries. PacketStream's strength lies in its value proposition, providing wide IP availability at competitive prices. Sourced from their own opt-in peer-to-peer network,

While PacketStream lacks precision targeting beyond country-level granularity and may not guarantee worldwide coverage, it caters to users seeking cost-effective solutions for residential proxies suitable for lower-security sites or high-volume traffic scenarios.

If you'd like to learn more about this provider's features and compare options, more information can be found here.