VDSL needs its own NIC, as it operates very differently to ethernet. Recently I discovered that my telephone line was operating on one wire, but VDSL was still operating in a degraded fashion. Suffice to say this would totally prevent ethernet from working.

ADSL could only encapsulate ATM frames (hence using PPPoA), VDSL includes a new mode called PTM that can encapsulate ethernet frames. This may be what you were reading about.