I have FTTC (supplied by PlusNet) at home.
I'm guessing that what you are getting is the same.
The faceplate I have has a single outlet. Before there was a BT Phone 
Jack with a microfilter plugged in. This provided the splitter between 
the ADSL and the Phone Line.
There was also an extension wired into the back of the faceplate (yeah I 
have a proper BT Krone Tool).
The 'DSL' branch went via a 2m phone extension to the ADSL Modem.
The OpenReach Engineer replaced the faceplate. This has the microfilter 
built in. Thus the phone extension still works as before.
The same 2m cable goes to the new Modem.
This has an RJ10 (Phone line) input and an RJ45 (Ethernet) output.
He tested the signal at the faceplate and also coming out of the modem. 
both were 39.8Mbits.
Plusnet then sent me a new Router. This is a Netgear POS. It is 
connected to the Modem via a 1m piece of Ethernet. It has Wireless as 
well as 4 RJ45 ports.
The router was already configured to sign onto the network so I had 
nothing to do at that end.
I wouldn't try connecting the RJ45 output from the Modem to a PC. You 
are not going to have any firewall or routing. You will have t 
oconfigure your PC to do the signon/auth as well. I wouldn't bother.
Your old cable modem might do the job but AFAIK, the old Virgin ones 
were even more a POS than the current generation ones. You will need to 
configure it to signon to the Zen system when it connects. The firmware 
in it may or may not let you do that.
I've had the service sine last May. There were a couple of issues at the 
start relating to the upgrade of the line speed and quotas but these 
were soon fixed on the phone with the support people. since then I've 
had only one issue and that was BT messing up the Exchange. At off peak 
times, I get 2.6-28Mbytes a second downloads. Naturally, this depends 
upon how many steps there are between the PlusNet  connection to the 
Internet backbone and the server supplying the content. Still, even at 
peak times, I get 1.5-2Mbytes/sec download.
I've certainly not regretted upgrading to FTTC.
Stephen D
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