Hello, I would just like to chime in on this aswell, not as much as a long standing member with lots of experience of being an LIR or even an RIPE member, but rather on the complete opposite side of the spectrum.
We are an VERY small ISP/MSP that have been approached by an fairly (the largest) FTTH provider in the nordics to be bundled as ISP for home consumers and MSP/ISP for companies they install fiber for during the next year or two in central sweden.
This means that for us we are now under massive pressure to acquire all the resources required to start delivering this in january/February from the new datacenters in two more locations and all the links as well as the IP ranges we intend to use for CG:nat for our consumer customers.
We have an /24 from prior to us becoming an member but that is entirely allocated to our WISP service and our primary hosting datacenter. We started the process of becoming an member and LIR about a week prior to the meetings (Unbeknownst to us) at that point there was zero in line for the /24 allocations and we were feeling confident that "Any day now our application will go through nd we can get an /24 almost immediatly" that is almost a month ago now and in the 5 days from that until when we could actually request an allocation as we finally became an member the queue became 150-200 ish and has only gone up since with the "Longest waiting" application going up with one day every days, and as such the queue is standing still solid.
This is worrying from us because even if we are planning to use IPv6 native on everything and all clients there is sadly a massive ammount of IPv4 still needed especially as an ISP.
What this means for us is that we are now being forced into becoming one of the buyers for the ranges that was intended for usecases like us but have been grabbed by organizations only intending to sell them. Causing us to pay way more for these IPadresses than we should have to really.
I will be quite frank about this and say that it feel very disheartening to essentially miss the 0 day queue allocations by 5 days. end up in a one month long quque that just grows with no more allocations and on top of that it is VERY obvious that these organisations uses the members list as a "To be customers" base because about 4 hours after we became members we got mails and phonecalls from about 5 different companies stating they want to sell us IP adresses.
It just feels like this is not what RIPE was intended for but obviously is being used for.
I apologize if i am sounding too salty or if my mail is not according to well established RIPE etiquette, and dont get me wrong. we are VERY happy about being a new member with a single LIR and getting our own IPv6 and insight into the future of the internet, just felt that i should give the point of view of exactly one of those "Small new one lir members" that many here reffer to and exactly how our experience with this issue has been..
Regards, Mathias W
CEO / Infrastructure Architect - West Digital Management AB.