Private Access Point Name (APN) for IoT

APN stands for Access Point Name. APN is used by mobile service providers to combine many SIM cards into a single limited network. Only SIM cards that are preprogrammed to work on a specific APN of the mobile provider can access the internet. This provides an additional layer of security for your IoT device. By ordering a private APN you limit the access to devices to a very narrow network. If the device does not have such APN pre-programmed, it will not be able to access the internet and that means it can’t go rogue on you being controlled by a hacker. The number of SIM cards on APN could be as few as one or as many as 1 million. This is your private network which you can access over the public internet. The device with private APN still gets a dynamic public IP address that will change quite often. This IP address can’t be used to initiate communications to the device as this IP is usually not known until the device initiated connection to the remote server. In such applications the initial communication to the device is done by SMS, rather than by mobile data – GPRS.

It is recommended to have a private APN for security critical applications.