I don't know how broadband works elsewhere in the world, but the fact is that BT's fibre optic offers the best value for money for my particular clients. My understanding is that broadband speeds in England are significantly slower than what you guys get on the mainland.
Remember everything here in privatised for efficiency of course! In reality we just pay more and get less!
a: Dsl is not cost effective - the last time that I looked.
b: Yes you connect into a phone socket because its FTTC not FTTP in other words, its fibre optic from exchange to the cabinet in your street and then plain telephone cable from the box in your street to your house. This makes a huge difference because ADSL which is the predominant type of Internet in this country suffers from speed issues because of the distance from the exchange to your house. This has made ADSL useless for business use unless your business is right on top of the exchange. I presume that DSL suffers from the same problem. So yes, its not 100% fibre optic, but the distance from the box in your street to your house is neglible compared to the distance from your house to the exchange which is the real problem with ADSL.
C: PPPOE is actually quite alright. The biggest problem with it has always been line attenuation. But that again is an ADSL issue. And the second issue is the quality of the broadband router as many of them are rubbish.

I appreciate that DSL may work for you Lonkero and Glenn, but not in England. The telephone infrastructure in this country is ridiculous. Anyway putting aside the issue of what broadband each country uses, the question was more to do with how people connect to the Internet and where their firewalls sits with regards to the lan and actual Internet.

You misunderstood me Lonkero, I don't want to use the Draytek for firewalling, I was merely considering it from the point of view of getting the PPPOE connection setup as you can't just plug the modem into the firewall and expect it to work. I may look at the PPPOE nic card solution.

My clients can expect to get between 50-76Mb download speeds which is more than 3 times faster than what they are currently getting and they will be paying significantly less, therefore fibre optic is the way to go for my clients.

Interesting that your companies use Draytek as well Arend. I don't want to use the Draytek for a firewall because I do feel that my slackware box is far better, oarticularly as the slackware box is what will drive the content filtering. So essentially speaking I think I will go with my slackware box setup for PPPoe configuration as the Draytek is just duplication.

I also use Cisco Switches as well lol. anyway thanks for all the feedback.