Perhaps it all started with Brian Roberts. Standing on the stage on a balmy Las Vegas morning, Roberts wowed the bleary eyed crowd by downloading a 4 gigabit collection of encyclopedias and dictionaries in just a shade under four minutes. Or maybe it all started in the heady days after the Telecom Act, when Roberts gave a similar demonstration but using photos in a web browser. Or perhaps it started with the first Verizon FiOS ad promising ultra-fast downloads compared to cable modems.

Regardless of its origination, it all boils down to this--it’s a lie. Not a big, (insert your most hated politicians name here)-type of lie, but a lie nonetheless. It’s been happening for years and it’s about to get a lot worse.

When a cable operator, telco or wireless company advertises a data service promising up to 10 Mbps downloads, we all know “up to” are the key words. You know it and I know because we deal with these things everyday. We know that the actual speeds will vary just as every diet pill manufacturer and buyer knows that “actual results may vary.”

We know that actual speeds depend on a lot factors that simply are out of the control of the service provider. Say that gambling site you place your bets on is located in Aruba and suddenly has a surge in traffic. You might hang on for a while, knowing that broadband speed can be limited by server traffic and a multitude of other issues.

Now take a consumer whose only contact with our industry is paying a bill every month or calling to complain about the service. That same scenario yields a transaction that is likely to be slow, aggravating and potentially abandoned by the end user. The same end user who thinks everything connected to his or her PC should be delivered at promised speeds. They have no clue what 10 Mbps really means, but they know it’s suppose to be really fast.

DSL providers could always hide behind the fact that they can guarantee speeds on at least a portion of the network and therefore it really isn’t all their fault. That’s changing, though, with the rapid adoption of PON technologies. Certainly there are significant benefits to such a move but ironically, the move to PON puts everyone in the “shared bandwidth” group.

Verizon has started rolling out 50 Mbps service in select FiOS markets and Videotron has offered up 50 Mbps service in parts of Montreal but how many customers actually will get 50 Mbps? Based on past experience, probably none. Oh, they’ll get fast service. Faster than their neighbors at whom they can snicker. But not the full throttle for which they’re paying.

It smacks of car buyers who put undue importance on the advertised top speeds of specific models. A car that can go 200+ mph may be impressive, but is generally useless in most real-world scenarios.

Who’s up for 100 Mbps?

Vince Vittore is program manager of Yankee Group’s Enabling Technologies Service Provider group with an expertise in broadband solutions.