But if Gigabit is so popular around the world why all these problems. Or is the UK unique in using PPPoE too?

I see Rotor was posting here too, last year http://forums.thinkbroadband.com/fibre/t/4200391-rec...
Interesting that the cheap Homehub 3 blows the rather expensive Asus out of the water... and no doubt, the overpriced Draytek too.

Optimised code for handling PPPoE at a guess and buying a million or two of a router does reduce the price a lot.

Apparently, it's due to the dual-core processor being able to run concurrent threads.

Not jealous, honest

Broadband providers that offer gigabit speeds usually use Ethernet based setups so no PPPoE. For example from Gigaclear's website:

"Gigaclear delivers an all-fibre, active, fibre to the premises (FTTP) network. We provide a 1000BaseFX Ethernet service to every property we connect to."

Hyperoptic is the same if you opt for 100Mbps or 1Gbps because both are symmetric which again implies Ethernet based connections.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Or is the UK unique in using PPPoE too?

UK difference is that the network is wholesale in many cases. In US and other countries, an ISP owns a network and doesn't need to identify which customer to which ISP (think Virgin Media in UK, or even Sky or BE/O2 LLU).

In reply to a post by AndyHCZ:

Even the Asus RT-N66U has been reported to struggle with FTTP 330/30 - http://forums.smallnetbuilder.com/showthread.php?t=9425

The asus has been shown to handle 450 Mbps WAN to LAN but without PPPoE - similarly with the Apple Airport Extreme 5th Gen and the new AC 6th Gen.

The PPPoE overhead is computationally expensive - hopefully the new firmware for the N66U has corrected an issue with the hardware acceleration which should help. Not enough people have fast enough WAN to test it.

I have an N66U on a 100/100 corporate connection in the office, which is on Ethernet / Static IP, and that has no problems with throughput, symmetric 100 Mbps.

I know all that, the question really is given we are told we are so far behind the curve, surely another country has done PPPoE and VDSL2 at fast speeds before?

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

surely another country has done PPPoE and VDSL2 at fast speeds before?

Why? The other countries are telco's running the physical network and the ISP, and not forced by regulators to open to other ISPs.

I'm aware in the US only AT&T has VDSL2 deployments in their UVerse product, and this is mostly about television and trying to compete with cable and satellite. I don't think any US cable company use PPPoE either.