Vrftjkry

Let's say I am in Oregon and I have a mobile hotspot with a Maine phone number. When I connect to that hotspot on my laptop, would my public IP show from a range in Oregon or Maine? Are there any circumstances, other than using a proxy, under which I would show an IP from a region besides the one I'm in?

The carrier is T-Mobile.

I'm not either in Oregon or Maine, but from my experience with networking - there is no bigger ISP which would have one big IP address pool for whole US.

Usually IP pools are dedicated per area, and size of area is up to ISP. ISP could set IP pool for users from some region depending on their usernames (it's technically possible), but I never heard for such case.

Having that in mind, if you are not OK with IP you get, you can use either proxy or VPN, whatever and whichever suits you better. If you set VPN on your device, then all network apps will see your VPN IP address, if you use proxy - only apps you set to use proxy will have proxy IP address.

So if you need to "cover all your tracks", VPN is better, as no app you are using will have "wrong" IP address.

Edit: Geolocation by IP address using IPv4 MAY be wildly inaccurate.
Two simple examples:

ISP does not have enough IP's in it's current IP pool, and it borrows IP range from larger ISP from some other region/country.
If you get such IP, until IP pool geolocation data propagates, it will show you are somewhere else, and that somewhere MAY be wildly far, far away. :)

ISP have IP pool DB which is shared by several regions, which are wide apart. In such (rare, but possible) setup only part of IP addresses would be geolocated right, and other would/could have city/state or even continent wrongly attributed. I do not know of such setups for different continents :), but I have found that IP geolocation could easily miss city for 200 or 300 miles. Of course, that depends on your ISP, I speak only from my experience.

It is up to the provider to give you an ip address. It is very likely that if you frequently connect to your ISP's network, they will give you the same IP address as long as you are connected to their network.

Usually when you go out of the range of your own provider, you are connected to another provider's network who's relaying the traffic back to your provider. At least that's what happens in europe. I'm not from the US, so I'm not entirely sure if the provider has network access points throughout the entire region, or that they have to resort into allowing you access through a third-party.

If you go through a third-party, the networkname would reflect that by a change, and obviously you will get a new ip address. If the networkname stays the same, it is possible your ip address also remains the same, but it can change too.

That said, The IP Address protocols do not have a feature called geo location. This means that there is no way to trace your geo location based on your IP Address. So in order to compensate, many websites track your ip address and request your geo location through other means such as the geo information your phone uses. Wifi also has geo location features, and a router is capable of determining its geo location too.

Once a website tracks your ipaddress and is able to also get the geo location information (some websites will trigger: this website wants to know your geo location. Allow?) it can then store this into its database and share it with other web services to build a large database where other websites can query your geo location based on ip address. Because ip addresses change, it is very likely that in the past, someone with your ip address allowed access and shared its geo location to that website.

The database reflects that geo location to the current ip address even though it is false. Whether that geo location is close by or far away does not matter.

It does however state that its unknown what the geo location will match when you query the ipaddress.

I hope you understand where I'm coming from.

ISP does not have enough IP's in it's current IP pool, and it borrows IP range from larger ISP from some other region/country. If you get such IP, until IP pool geolocation data propagates, it will show you are somewhere else, and that somewhere MAY be wildly far, far away