I am looking at moving to a new ISP, potentially Bigpipe, from Snap. (i'm also looking at Slingshot and a couple of others)

Looking at signing up for UFB, but just want to clarify a few things.

I see mentioned in in their plan details that "public IP's are available upon request".
Does this mean that I won't be able to open up ports as I see fit on my IP, unless I request a public IP? If that's the case, how long does a request take to process?

I'm going to troll about the forum to see if there are some posts regarding performance.. thats probably my main concern at this stage, is what bigpipes performance is like. So if anyone has any posts that they know of with particularly helpful info, feel free to link them here- in the meantime I'll take a look through the search.

Last question I would like to know as well is; are there any downsides to Bigpipe in comparison to other ISP's?