Even now lot of you people aren't using your own IP, but are sharing one with maybe hundreds other people. That's called NAT. You don't need your own public IP address (which is what this is about) to connect to the internet - and by that I mean even your router doesn't need a public IP. You need one if you want to host a server accessible from the internet (and even then not always, if you can route the traffic to your machine).
