Remote connection from cPanel to MySQL on WAMP

I am trying to use a simple PHP connection to connect remotely to a MySQL database. I have searched many threads and still receiving error ‘Connection failed: Can’t connect to MySQL server on ‘my IP address’ (111 "Connection refused")’

I can access the server remotely using the wan IP address no problem i.e. The software files. I am using port forwarding to do that on port 80.

My connection is very simple

<?php
$servername = "my ip address";
$username = "user";
$password = "password";
$dbname = "company";

// Create connection
$conn = new mysqli($servername, $username, $password, $dbname);
// Check connection
if ($conn->connect_error) {
  die("Connection failed: " . $conn->connect_error);
}

$sql = "SELECT id, name FROM table";
$result = $conn->query($sql);

if ($result->num_rows > 0) {
  // output data of each row
  while($row = $result->fetch_assoc()) {
    echo "id: " . $row["id"]. " - Name: " . $row["name"]. "<br>";
  }
} else {
  echo "0 results";
}
$conn->close();
?>

I have tried the following;

1. Creating a new user with all privileges in phpMyAdmin and using % as host

2. Allow from all in phpmyadmin.conf and HTTP.conf (don’t think this is the problem)

3. Adding port forwarding on router to 3306

4. Disabled all firewalls on local machine

5. Adding bind-address = 0.0.0.0 to my.ini file (restarting the server)

A lot of thread suggest that the default bind-address is set to localhost or 127.0.0.1 but in my.ini under [mysqld] all I have from default is

default_authentication_plugin=mysql_native_password
port = 3306

I am using WAMP version 3.1.9 64 bit version