You are forgetting that many universities (at least in the US) are sitting on enormous allocations of address space due to being early users of the technology f

You are forgetting that many universities (at least in the US) are sitting on enormous allocations of address space due to being early users of the technology from DARPA. Coupled with "NAT isn't a firewall", assigning actual IPs to your end devices isn't all that silly if you happen to have a few million to spare.