Illinois proxies built on the Chicago DMA footprint

Chicago is most of Illinois, practically speaking

Chicago (DMA #3) dominates any Illinois proxy discussion. Nine surrounding counties plus NW Indiana make up DMA 602, and it's where nearly all of the state's retail, finance, and B2B-tech commerce routes. Rockford (#135), Peoria (#117), Champaign (#87), and the St. Louis-overspill markets in western Illinois are real but smaller — we carry capacity in each, thinner than in Chicago.

Carrier footprint

Chicago is a Comcast (AS7922) stronghold. The Xfinity footprint covers most of the urban core plus the affluent North Shore and western suburbs. AT&T Internet (AS7018) runs fiber in dense tracts around the Loop and in parts of the South Side. Comcast's AS7922 Chicago allocation is peered at Equinix Chicago CH2 and announces out of there to the Midwest backbone — a signal Adtech stacks treat as the "real Chicago" network path.

On mobile, all three majors are competitive in Chicago. T-Mobile has the deepest standalone 5G overlay as of 2026; Verizon runs the tightest Ultra Wideband footprint in the Loop; AT&T is strongest in the suburbs. All three route out of the Chicago peering fabric; latency to a CH2- peered target is sub-5ms from any of them.

DMA 602 mechanics

When an ad-tech target says "Chicago market," they almost always mean Nielsen DMA 602 — Cook, DuPage, Lake, Will, Kane, Kendall, McHenry, and Porter / Lake counties in Indiana. A proxy exit in Des Plaines and one in Gary, Indiana are both "Chicago" to the target. A proxy exit in Rockford is not — it's DMA 135.

Proxaro's Chicago rotation defaults to 602 allocations on Comcast and AT&T; if you want strict Illinois-only, pass X-PX-State: il and we'll exclude the NW Indiana portion of the DMA.

What Chicago work looks like

Retail and grocery. Jewel-Osco, Mariano's, and the Chicago Walmart supercenter layout treat Chicago as a distinct pricing zone. Residential Comcast exits in North Side ZIPs surface the consumer-facing price that's often meaningfully different from the downstate or the Wisconsin border markets.

B2B software sales signals. Many enterprise software sites geo-gate case studies, pricing calculators, and demo request flows by DMA. Capturing the Chicago variant accurately requires a Comcast or AT&T Chicago exit, not a national datacenter.

Cubs / Bears / Bulls merch. Regional sports-team e-commerce often routes Chicago-IP traffic through different fulfillment queues.

CME Group and Chicago finance

Chicago hosts CME Group's futures and options exchanges, the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT), a dense cluster of prop-trading firms (Citadel, Jump, DRW, Chicago Trading Company), and a large share of US commodities-markets infrastructure. Trading-firm recruiting, fintech-B2B creative, and commodities-retail creative all route Chicago-IP traffic distinctly. For finance-category creative testing outside of NYC proper, Chicago is the second-most-weighted US metro.

Pool and pricing

Chicago is our third-deepest metro after NYC and LA. Coast covers Chicago; Carrier opens Comcast AS7922 ASN pinning. City depth: Chicago. Neighbors: Indiana, Missouri.