Have only skimmed through the thread but i’ll try and lay out a simple explanation from an ISP perspective
Firstly it doesn’t matter that its a WISP. This is not a reason for you to not have a public IP address, however there’s a lot more behind-the-scenes going on that can be a very viable explanation for why they won’t give you one. So let me attempt to explain
First and foremost, a WISP has significantly higher cost and network complexity to deliver a service to a customer. Fixed services are relatively simple, they share capacity on a switch or a DSLAM and often they are chassis units with multiple cards with high density. Multiple resellers/ISPs have access to this equipment, but they often don’t maintain or configure any of it. From their perspective they simply have a customer connection arrive at the data center via a VLAN/VXLAN/VPLS and they handle it all at a few central locations.
Whereas fixed wireless needs a dish at every single customers location, they need power, pole position and site access to the multi point radio and it can severely limit density. Not to mention its using shared radio waves, there isn’t’ a dedicated link for every customer. Public IP addresses aren’t always cheap, and its yet again another ongoing expense.
However the bigger issue is that all of this equipment needs configuration and is entirely setup and managed by the WISP, for instance there might be failover links that add complexity to the network (since wireless is inherently a service without any guarantees on bandwidth or connection quality). This has a lot more administrative overhead
Depending on how they have configured their network, it may be that routing needs to be setup such as to effectively extend their reach from a data center all the way through a network to eventually get to a tower and at your premises. If this is the case, then all that routing needs to be configured and maintained, and adding a single additional public IP address just for you, means a fair bit more config on their side
It’s not so much the initial work involved, but the management and maintenance. The absolute worst thing at scale is when you have individually configured devices that don’t conform to any standard and you are constantly doing custom config to make things work
To you it may seem like a switch has been flicked, but on the back end it may be like stringing a cable across the front of an otherwise nice neat equipment rack. This doesn’t matter if the situation is a single switch on a desk, you’re just going to plug things in. But at scale you may be stringing a thousand cables, and you end up with a complete fkn mess that is a nightmare to troubleshoot, fix or expand
If they say no you can’t have a public IP, then too bad you can’t. And it’s probably for a good reason
You may be asking them to do a hell of a lot more work than you realize, and I don’t blame them for just outright refusing if it creates a mess
Doesn’t mean its the end of the world. You can either get angry because the ISP won’t spend resources on catering to you, and spend lots of time on a forum. Or you can spend a few of your own resources and take matters into your own hands. Set up a VPN connection and policy based routing (if you don’t want all traffic always going across the VPN), that way you can have your own public IP address at the VPN’s data center, piped directly to your router
Even better, take this is a learning experience and find a server hosting company, something very cheap that lets you deploy your own image. Spin up a MikroTik CHR image, then setup an EoIP tunnel (benefit of this is you will be able to use a full 1500 byte MTU) and again setup your own routing
(and why not?)