Indeed, and what I'd expect is that customers with a static address will just have "an address" from the same pool(s) as everyone else - except that the address is locked to that customer rather than changing with each connection. In most situations, I'd imagine it's actually more work to have a separate pool for static addresses.
My guess is that they've now got as far as testing the "back end" stuff that will serve up configs etc to customers having learned from the earlier trial - so once the config is entered then it'll work just as the final service should. But they won't yet have built the front end systems to do the configs easily/automatically - hence the "manual config" part of it. IMO this is indeed good news, as it suggests they are now much closer to having a permanent service in place. Presumably, as long as the trial doesn't throw up any major problems, their next step will be to start building the front end and management stuff before offering the service to everyone.
But that is just (slightly) educated guesswork.
