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Too many customer devices don't support /31 subnets unfortunately, for example with Draytek we've seen an issue where it would accept the 255.255.255.254 subnet but we'd see a whole raft of connection issues making the connection unusable.

If we provide a dedicated IP for a connection where we provide the LAN we just put a single /32 on the loopback and NAT onto this which is obviously much more economic with addresses.

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Why this subnet thing is even needed? I don't understand it. Why not provide just a single IP address? Seems like big waste of addresses.

Because a lot of things that should be thrown into a volcano are used as routers. And routers need their interfaces configured. And the upstream interface needs to be in a network. And so that network needs a broadcast address, the router needs its own address, there needs to be a next hop address, and since you can't allocate 3, you do 4.

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