I think that I understand what you are saying Lonk. It may not be true fibre optic in technical terms. I believe it uses vdsl. The point is, my clients currently pay almost twice the price for a broadband of less than 20Mb and we have no control over the firewall as my clients connect through the council. The clients that I am referring to are primary schools. I am offering them broadband speeds that are nearly 3 times faster and half the price. I have used BT's speed test which is supposed to be very accurate to determine exactly what speed the clients will end up getting. In addition, the primary schools will have me controlling their firewall and not the council. This is very important as all too often the schools cannot get certain things to work because the council refuse to allow the program access. Security is all and well, but now when a client cannot use the network properly because there is a one size fits all solution for all schools by the council.
I am happy with my slackware solution which uses iptables and is in my opinion very secure and in addition, I have the dansguardian filtering working very well. I just don't have any experience of connecting firewall boxes to fibre optic or if you prefer to call it vdsl hence the question.

Perhaps for the type of companies and countries that you work in, this solution is not much good to you, but in England, I honestly cannot see any comparable solution that offers that speed and that price.

I have looked into matter further, and I will go with the PPPoe Network card setup in the slackware box connecting to the BT Modem as the router is the prime problem. I will get back to you in two months time with feedback on how it works out.

Eventually we will get true fibre optic as in fibre to the premises, but for now we will settle for FTTC.