You would expect that at the cost of mobile data in South Africa, the cellular network providers would be happy to let you use your data in any way you like, but unfortunately you would be wrong.  

Most have implemented restricted APN's. This means that when you are on a 3G/4G network you can see out onto the internet, but they do not allow outside traffic to see you, which obviously is bad for putting things like camera's on the internet.

FOSCAM's NEW P2P CAMERA'S WITH EZLINK - NO MORE UNRESTRICTED APN's, NO MORE PORT FORWARDING or DYNAMIC DNS's - TESTED ON VODACOM, CELL C AND MTN's NETWORK WITH A STANDARD APN - IF THE CAMERA CAN SEE THE INTERNET, YOU CAN SEE THE CAMERA

 

If you have good MTN coverage but do not want the hassle of signing up with the exspensive guys of South Africa,then we strongly recommend our good friends Afrihost, who are using MTN's network but their own APN which allows for port forwarding.

Their customer service is great and you can get 5GB for as little as R145 a month without a contract. Perfect for the Holiday home camera pack and a little surfing on the side. No hassles, no fuss and a completely uninterrupted internet experience on 4G or LTE.

 

If you are on Telkom mobile or 8.ta you are in luck, their 3G/4G network can be unrestricted if you add a new APN with the following settings:

Profile name: unrestricted
IP type: IPv4
APN: unrestricted
And then leave the rest of the fields blank.

UPDATE: 

Unrestricted APN on Vodacom can not be provisioned on new prepaid SIMs from early 2020. 

South Africa's Favourite network makes it a little harder, please click here to download and fill in this form send the form to   155datasupport@vodacom.co.za once completed log into your 3G/4G router and change the APN settings from Internet to Unrestricted.

Cell C like Vodacom does not just allow you to connect devices to the internet, but you can  download and fill in the this form once completed email or fax the form to the number email in the form with a copy of your ID. Once you have an unrestricted APN please remember to log into your 3G/4G router to change the APN to work with Unrestricted APN rather than the internet APN.

 

It would appear that after years of not allowing any port forwarding on their network, MTN has decided to allow Contract customers access to their own private network and paid for Megabytes. You will have to phone them to discuss what they call MTNVPN. Unfortunately you still cannot enable unrestricted port forwarding on MTN pre-paid or month to month.