General retail
The most visited shopping site in September 2026. Prices, stock and seller counts by category.
South Africa proxies for retail, grocery and property data on local networks
1.71M+ residential IPs in the pool, October 2026, plus mobile exits on MTN, Telkom and Cell C. Residential from $1.69 and mobile from $2.19 per GB. Choose South Africa with -cc-za and narrow it to a province or, where available, a city. The order page lists static ISP and datacenter IPs.
Residential IPs1.71M+
South African household addresses in the pool, October 2026.
Networks in our sample16
Different ASNs among the 40 exits placed in South Africa by ipinfo.io in our gateway test of 26 October 2026, across 12 cities and 8 provinces.
Province and city hits22 of 24
Exits placed where the login asked, for province and for city alike, in the same test.
Sticky sessions60 min
Hold an exit for up to an hour with -sid-<key>-ttl-60, or let it rotate.
Products
Four proxy types for South Africa
| Proxy | In South Africa | Session | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Residential | 1.71M+ IPs in the pool, October 2026, on Afrihost, rain, Herotel, Telkom and other local ISPs | Rotating, or sticky up to 60 min | $3.49 → $1.69 per GB |
| Mobile | Carriers seen in our October sample of 12: MTN, Telkom and Cell C | Rotating, or sticky up to 60 min | $3.99 → $2.19 per GB |
| ISP | Static IPs, one customer each; availability by country on the order page | Static for the rental | $2.00 per IP / month |
| Datacenter | Dedicated IPs, up to 10 Gbps; availability by country on the order page | Static | $1.20 per IP / month |
What South African IPs are for
Rand prices, local stock and a phone-first audience
Most South African data work is about prices in rand. Similarweb’s September 2026 category leaders are local names: Takealot, Makro and Woolworths in retail, Checkers, Shoprite and Pick n Pay in groceries, Property24 for homes, AutoTrader and WeBuyCars for cars.
Shoppers arrive on phones. In the 2022 census 60.5% of households went online mainly through a cellphone, and Stats SA’s 2024 household survey found only 17.4% with internet at home. StatCounter put 77% of page views on mobile in September 2026, a volatile monthly figure, with Android at 81% of mobile.
Google handled 91.75% of searches in September 2026 and Bing 7.36%; Huawei’s Petal Search came third with 0.31%. Track rankings with gl=za from a local exit (SERP method).
Coverage
Provinces, people and where our exits landed
Stats SA puts the 2026 population at 63.5 million. In a sample of 40 exits through our gateway on 26 October 2026, all placed in South Africa, eight of the nine provinces appeared, with Cape Town (16 exits) and Johannesburg (10) far ahead of the rest.
| Province | Population, mid-2026 | Exits in our sample of 40 | Province key |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gauteng | 16,295,325 | 13 | -st-gauteng |
| KwaZulu-Natal | 12,282,836 | 3 | -st-kwazulunatal |
| Western Cape | 7,722,158 | 18 | -st-westerncape |
| Eastern Cape | 7,031,109 | 1 | -st-easterncape |
| Limpopo | 6,358,667 | 1 | not tested |
| Mpumalanga | 5,161,746 | 2 | not tested |
| North West | 4,227,795 | 1 | not tested |
| Free State | 3,060,972 | 1 | -st-freestate |
| Northern Cape | 1,381,772 | 0 | not tested |
Population: Stats SA mid-year estimates, July 2026. City keys that worked: -city-johannesburg, -city-capetown, -city-durban, -city-pretoria, -city-bloemfontein and -city-portelizabeth (the name Gqeberha is refused). ipinfo.io placed 22 of 24 province-targeted and 22 of 24 city-targeted exits where asked. Two province requests, one for Gauteng and one for the Eastern Cape, came out in Cape Town; two Pretoria requests came out in Benoni and Johannesburg, in the same province.
Networks
Who connects South African homes and phones
Telkom, Vodacom and MTN each reach 12 to 16% of South Africa’s internet users. ISPs such as Afrihost and Vox follow, and their customers’ traffic carries the ISP’s own ASN.
| Network | Access | ASN | Share of South African users | IPv6 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Telkom (Openserve) | Home broadband and mobile | AS5713 · AS37457 | 15.8% | 0.1% |
| Vodacom | Mobile | AS29975 · AS36994 | 15.1% | 0.1% |
| MTN | Mobile | AS12091 · AS16637 | 12% | 0.1% |
| Dimension Data (NTT DATA) | ISP network | AS20011 · AS10474 · AS3741 | 8.8% | 6.5% |
| Afrihost | ISP | AS37611 | 7.5% | 24.4% |
| rain | Mobile network | AS37105 | 7% | 0.1% |
| Vox | ISP | AS11845 | 5% | 0.1% |
| Herotel | ISP | AS328471 | 4.8% | 2.8% |
| Cell C | Mobile | AS37168 | 4.1% | 0.1% |
| SADV | ISP | AS37049 | 1.8% | 0.1% |
| fibertime | ISP | AS329126 | 1.8% | 0.1% |
| MetroFibre | Fibre network | AS327782 | 1.6% | 57.0% |
User shares estimated by APNIC Labs on 24 October 2026, adding up each operator’s ASNs; operator names from PeeringDB. Nine exits in our sample sat on Dimension Data’s AS20011, with reverse DNS names of MWEB and Webafrica. Picking a network by key works only in the US, UK and Germany.
A South African quirk
A country that still runs on IPv4
APNIC Labs measured 4.1% of South African users as IPv6-capable in the 30 days to 25 October 2026, against 59.4% in Brazil over the same days. Telkom, Vodacom, MTN, Cell C, rain and Vox each sit at or below 0.1%. MetroFibre (57.0%) and Afrihost (24.4%) are the main networks moving the other way.
So a South African exit is an IPv4 address. Mobile operators with almost no IPv6 have to share each public IPv4 address among many phones, so a site’s rate limit on one address hits everyone behind it. Pace requests to match.
Cell C adds a twist. It switched off its own radio network in 2023 and its customers now use MTN and Vodacom towers, as Connecting Africa reported, yet its traffic still appears under Cell C’s AS37168. Two of the twelve mobile exits in our sample were Cell C; five were MTN’s AS16637, one MTN’s AS12091 and four Telkom’s AS37457.
Local targets
South African sites worth monitoring
Retail chains online
Second and fourth in e-commerce traffic. Weekly promotions and range.
Groceries
Checkers led grocery traffic, ahead of Shoprite and Pick n Pay. Basket prices and specials.
Property
The two leading property portals. Asking prices, rentals and listing counts by suburb.
Classifieds
The top classifieds site. Asking prices only, never sellers’ details.
Used cars
First and second in vehicles. Listing prices by make, model and year.
The newer marketplace
22nd among all South African sites. Compare its offers with Takealot’s.
Jobs
Second to Indeed in job-site traffic. Postings and advertised pay by city.
Rankings: Similarweb, September 2026. Collect public pages without logging in, under each site’s terms.
For developers
A Cape Town exit, checked before use
The loop asks for the Western Cape and Cape Town, keeps the first exit ipinfo.io places there, and reuses its session key for up to an hour.
import requests, uuid
GATE = "gate.aeonproxy.com:7000"
def za_exit(province, city, want, tries=5):
for _ in range(tries):
sid = uuid.uuid4().hex[:8]
login = f"ap_a1b2c3-cc-za-st-{province}-city-{city}-sid-{sid}-ttl-60"
proxy = f"http://{login}:PASS@{GATE}"
geo = requests.get("https://ipinfo.io/json", proxies={"http": proxy, "https": proxy}, timeout=20).json()
if geo.get("city") == want:
return proxy, geo # same exit for up to 60 minutes
return None, None
proxy, geo = za_exit("westerncape", "capetown", "Cape Town")
print(geo["ip"], geo["city"], geo["region"], geo["org"])
# 41.242.XX.137 Cape Town Western Cape AS37049 SADV (Pty) LtdKeys are names in lowercase letters with spaces and hyphens removed: kwazulunatal, easterncape, portelizabeth. ipinfo.io answers "KwaZulu-Natal" and "Western Cape". South Africa has one time zone, Africa/Johannesburg (UTC+2, no daylight saving), so every exit pairs with the same clock.
curl -x gate.aeonproxy.com:7000 \
-U "ap_a1b2c3-cc-za-st-gauteng-city-johannesburg-sid-jhb01-ttl-30:PASS" \
https://ipinfo.io/jsonFibre
Open-access fibre: the ISP is not the network
ICASA counted 3.26 million fixed broadband subscriptions in September 2025, 3.0 million of them fibre (up 22% in a year) and only 227,420 on DSL. The networks below build the lines and ISPs sell the service. In APNIC’s October 2026 data Vumatel’s own ASN carries under 0.01% of users and Frogfoot’s 0.01%, while ISPs on their fibre carry far more.
| Fibre network operator | Homes passed | Connected | As of |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vumatel | 2,040,231 | 864,208 | March 2025 |
| Openserve (Telkom) | 1,453,810 | 756,409 | September 2025 |
| Herotel | 585,981 | 293,036 | June 2025 |
| MetroFibre | 510,000 | 172,000 | June 2025 |
| Frogfoot | 406,000 | 169,000 | June 2025 |
| Octotel | 372,000 | 121,800 | June 2025 |
| fibertime | 250,000 | 65,000 | December 2025 |
Operator figures as compiled by TeleGeography (February 2026), which also reports that Vumatel’s takeover of Herotel was approved in December 2025. ICASA figures: State of the ICT Sector Report, March 2026.
Infrastructure
Johannesburg and Cape Town, where the servers are
NAPAfrica, housed in Teraco’s data centres, is where networks meet: PeeringDB lists 544 on its Johannesburg exchange, 280 in Cape Town and 139 in Durban. xneelo, formerly Hetzner SA, runs its data centre in Centurion.
Geolocation follows the servers. South African university sites hosted at xneelo and Microsoft looked up as Johannesburg, one on AWS as Cape Town. A so-called residential exit on xneelo’s AS37153 or a cloud ASN is a server; our IP-check guide shows the lookup.
Power is steadier. Eskom counted 341 days without load-shedding by 22 April 2026 and forecast none for the winter to 31 August. Operators still doubled spending on backup batteries and generators in the year to September 2025, to R387.7 million and R426.8 million (ICASA). If an exit drops, retry with a new session key.
POPIA and the Cybercrimes Act
POPIA (Act 4 of 2013) governs personal information, and the Information Regulator can impose administrative fines of up to R10 million (section 109). Section 12(2)(a) lifts the duty to collect from the person directly when information is in a public record or was deliberately made public; the rest of the Act still applies. Section 69 requires consent for unsolicited electronic marketing, so contact lists built from listings are off limits. The Regulator’s August 2026 briefing, as Werksmans summarised it, mentioned a referral concerning Truecaller.
The Cybercrimes Act 19 of 2020 makes it an offence to access a computer system unlawfully and intentionally (section 2). Stay on public, logged-out pages within each site’s terms. We found no South African law aimed at proxies or VPNs as such.
Not legal advice. Court cases elsewhere: our 2022–2026 rulings guide.Free 200 MB — join our Telegram
Join @aeonprox, link our bot and test residential or mobile proxies for 72 hours. No card needed.
South Africa proxy questions
An exit with a South African address, so sites show rand prices, local stock and local search results. You need one when the answer depends on the visitor being in the country.
1.71M+ residential IPs in the pool, October 2026. The pool changes as households connect and disconnect. We do not publish a South African mobile IP count.
Yes: -st-gauteng, -st-westerncape, -st-kwazulunatal, and cities such as -city-durban where available. On 26 October 2026, 22 of 24 requests landed where asked at each level, per ipinfo.io. For Gqeberha use portelizabeth. Network keys exist only in the US, UK and Germany.
Of the 40 residential exits placed in South Africa in our sample: Dimension Data 9, Afrihost 8, rain 4, SADV 3, Herotel 3, then 11 smaller networks. The 12 mobile exits were on MTN (6), Telkom (4) and Cell C (2).
Residential for retail, grocery and property data. Mobile for app and mobile-web checks, since most South Africans browse on phones; it costs $0.50 per GB more at every tier. ISP proxies keep one static address all month.
We found no law against proxies as such. POPIA covers personal information, the Cybercrimes Act covers unauthorised access, and each site’s terms apply to collection. Not legal advice.
Rarely. Free lists are mostly open or hijacked machines whose owners can see your traffic, on addresses sites have often blocked. A free trial exists here; the pricing page has its terms.
Put gate.aeonproxy.com:7000 and your login with -cc-za into the browser’s proxy settings, an extension or your HTTP client. The docs list every key and the SOCKS5 port.
Of the 40 exits placed in South Africa in our sample, 18 were in the Western Cape, home to 12% of the population. Stats SA’s 2024 survey, quoted by ICASA, found fixed home internet in 44.9% of Western Cape households and 5.6% in Mpumalanga, so home connections cluster there.
Both are in Gauteng, and geolocation databases draw city lines differently. Our two Pretoria misses were placed in Benoni and Johannesburg; retry with a new session key if the city matters.
On 26 October 2026 the five exits shown at the top measured 164 to 185 ms round trip to Frankfurt, where our gateway runs. The target’s response time comes on top.