I have to voice my opinion here and support exactly what you are saying. We are a small MSP/ISP, We are on IPv4 for our fiber ISP customers doing Nat with upwards of 50 households sharing one IP with dedicated port translation ranges. We have one ripe allocated IPv4 which we use for our own infra and managed services in our main site, outside of that we have to lease one range for our cloudstack public IPs, we lease one range for our fiber ISP customers NAT stuff and we lease one range for shared static allocations for our fiber ISP customers as well as some infra adressing on our secondary site. We are trying to push everything to be IPv6 native but it is close to impossible for a shop of our size because 1. Good luck forcing things like microsoft to fix their broken IPv6 on prem server features for our customers. 2. Good luck forcing companies like sony to make playstation work AT ALL in a ipv6 only mode (it does not) same with many other companies that provide BIG products. All of this compounds to us either 1. Building hacky NAT64 solutions with our mikrotik infra or going the easy and not TOO expensive option of renting/leasing (Thank you resilans for making it possible for us to do business as a SP without being gouged and helping us become and LIR to begin with) So the the deathspiral of IPv4 allocation for legitimate business being small feeding more leasing/selling feeding smaller allocation to SPs feeding them going and buying more is very real and even if we are not contributing a lot to the issue ourselfs it is a noticeable issue for us every time we consider making the service better for our customers and with thousands of SPs out there like us it will definitively make it a lot worse. Regards. Mathias W. West Digital Management AB On 30/10/2026 15:13, Yannis Nikolopoulos wrote:

Hello,

Following Marco Schmidt's very informative presentation during RIPE93, it's maybe time to revisit the IPv4 address allocation policy. Possible options were presented by Marco, in order to ease restrictions, such as: allow repeated requests or increase allocation size. There are many arguments to be made here, both for and against, so I'll just state the "new ISP/MSP" case: with 256 IPv4 addresses, the provider is pretty much limited in their options and while growing they'll have to either buy IPv4 addresses (thus feeding and extending this vicious circle) or strangle their users (with less ports or more aggressive NATs etc).

All I'm trying to say that, ISPs (like IXPs, which are BTW treated differently) are different from other RIPE members and providing they can show said growth and plans, they should be able to get additional IPv4 allocations. In essence, not all LIRs are equally displeased with this policy. Some are more displeased than others.

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