You are thinking of ADSL, which is limited to 24mpbs. BT does sell VDSL as fibre, but usually the distance of copper connection is only out to the street.
I think you're right. I spoke to the guys at Plusnet and they said it was fibre to the cabinet and no matter what package I picked it was copper to my house. With that in mind, I thought they were effectively limiting your bandwidth at the cabinet based on your package.
From the plusnet page:
> Speeds are available as follows:
> Average download speeds of 36Mb† or 66Mb† for Fibre (FTTC) enabled areas depending on the package you choose
> Average download speeds of 10MbΦ for ADSL2+ enabled areas
Adsl is a different beast indeed. It's physically limited because the frequency that it uses and the encoding that was possible or practical in the 90's can't carry more than 24. Vdsl is indeed throttled at the edge router into two products, basically the lower frequency components provide the lower speed product and propagate better over longer lines.
From the plusnet page: > Speeds are available as follows:
> Average download speeds of 36Mb† or 66Mb† for Fibre (FTTC) enabled areas depending on the package you choose > Average download speeds of 10MbΦ for ADSL2+ enabled areas