Also glad I run wireguard for my homelab.

Fortunately for my work connection, I work at the ISP I get my internet service from, so they just pipe my work VLAN to a port on my ONT and I don’t need a VPN.

Where I lived in Maryland, I had Xfinity and FiOS coverage at my house. Probably the reason prices were so reasonable.

$50 one time is a great price. We charge our members $10 a month if they request a static. We’re also a not for profit coop, so all that money gets either dumped back into network infrastructure and expansion plans, or capital credits for our members.

Honestly I don’t have a good answer for that. The ones who charge a one time fee are honestly being pretty generous (depending on the price you paid) considering there are yearly dues to ARIN/RIPE/APNIC/etc for IP allocations depending on their aggregate block size as well as the fact that IPs are generally very valuable right now, and go up in value depending on the block size.

If they have a legacy registration they also don’t have to pay those dues, though the downside is they don’t get the newer features like RPKI without signing a LRSA/RSA (and therefor paying those dues) and getting their routes certified. Usually doesn’t cause an issue as not many peers drop unvalidated BGP prefixes on IPv4.

That being said, if your ISP has been in the game for decades, they probably have owned their blocks for decades and got them for pennies on the dollar when ARIN and other registries were handing out IP addresses like candy. I know the last /24 my company had to buy cost us somewhere in the neighborhood of $14,000 when it was all said and done, and that was just for 256 IPs.

Eventually IPv4 addresses will become so prohibitively expensive, that is what will eventually push mass IPv6 adoption on the ASN side of things.

It’s really common in cellular connections as well as smaller regional ISPs. I work for a rural fiber co-op with about 50,000 members/customers and we do CGNAT for all our members by default because we only have about 36,000 IPs allocated to us. We also have full ipv6 support as well with every customer getting a /56.

To get a big enough block for all our enterprise/business/residential customers to do 1:1 NAT for ipv4 would probably require an entire /16 which costs somewhere in the neighborhood of 2 million dollars last I checked. And even then we would eventually run out because we are constantly expanding to cover rural areas that have been ignored for decades by the big ISPs. Right now if a member needs a static or routable we just charge 10$ a month, and we have enough in reserve for all our members to operating like this likely until the entire internet abandons ipv4.

Wow, that sounds like pretty awful internet conditions. What country do you live in if you don’t mind me asking?

Yeah, we have a full IPv6 deployment on our entire network and have for a many years now. We’re a small rural regional coop so we make an effort to do right by our members the best we can. And for the members who really need a rout-able IPv4 IP, we do have limited blocks we can assign to interfaces if they request it.

Not trying to defend CGNAT because I hate it, but as someone who works for what most of you would consider a “good ISP”, we use it simply because don’t have enough IP addresses to do 1:1 NAT for every connection, and buying the amount of IP addresses required to do so would literally cost us somewhere in the neighborhood of ~4 million dollars - on top of the headache that we don’t know the history of these IP addresses which could cause issues if they are on blacklists, etc.

Haha that sounds familiar. My plex server is on a 4770k and my unRAID server is on a 4790k. Finally getting parts to decommission the 4770k.

From experience I would say avoid this. I started my homelab this way. First it was a plex server just so 1 family member could locally stream movies without me having to copy it to a flash drive. Then another family member saw it, so it was 2, then 3. Less than a year later I have ~10-15 regular regular streamers and I can’t play video games on my computer from the hours of 4PM to 1AM because my CPU was being hit so hard.

Eventually I built a new gaming rig, pulled out my GPU. Turned the old machine into a full time server and gamed on the new machine.