Earlier this week I wrote how European IPv4 addresses have now all been allocated. The IPv6 address space is extremely bigger than IPv4 is. IPv4 has 2^32 possible addresses, as they have a length of 32 bits. IPv6 is 128 bits long, allowing 2^128 addresses.
We have an IPv6 address with our fiber to the home connection (currently 500Mbit symmetrical, which is actually a step down from the 1Gbit symmetrical we had before). I asked our provider what type of address allocation they use for IPv6. They allocate a (currently recommended) /48 block to us. A /48 IPv6 block contains 2^(128−48) = 2^80 addresses. The total IPv4 address space is 2^32 addresses. So we actually have an available address space at home that is 2^16 (65.536) times larger than the square of the total number of IPv4 addresses (2^16*2^32*2^32=2^80). These are mind bogglingly large numbers.
Internet providers here in Canada have always charged an (enormous) surcharge for having a (single) static IP address assigned to your connection. This was somewhat defensible under IPv4, but under IPv6 it’s clearly not.
Yes, some Dutch providers were like that too. Luckily my first ISP (Demon Internet) entered the Dutch market late ’96 with the promise of a fixed IP address for every customer. So I’ve always had the luxury of having my own IP address after I said my university’s dial-in service farewell. I was able to run my site and blog on a server under my desk for a decade because of it, (and because I early on had an ADSL connection), until I switched to a hosting package in the fall of 2007.