IP camera behind Carrier Grade NAT

Hi everyone!

I have a technical question regarding IP cameras from Dahua.

A friend of mine bought an IP camera and installed Dahua app on his phone.

He is using a provider, which uses Carrier Grade NAT. Since on a Carrier Grade NAT the IP address of the router is not public, it is usually not possible to connect to the router without a tunnel, like VPN.

However, he successfully connected to the IP camera with the help of a college.

How is it possible?

Does Dahua provide some kind of VPN Server as a service? Maybe with Dahua DDNS?

This can only work, if the camera is always connecting to a Dahua service, which then establishes the connection between the smart phone and the camera.

Or am I missing something?

Ok. I found an answer. Dahua offers a P2P cloud service, which acts as some kind off connection manager between the IP cam and the phone.

This way, even without a public WAN IP, it is possible to connect to the Dahua devices.

Nice service from Dahua.

As long as they offer it...

As long as their service is secure

Some ISPs have implemented CG NAT as a stop-gap pending IPv6 deployment. Mine allowed me to opt out... I just had to advise that it affected my surveillance system, and the change was made in minutes.

Cheers, Steve