I’m not sure that there is a major industry that lies more to its customers than the cellular industry. The whole industry has spent the last decade touting its 4G LTE networks, when in fact the industry is just now installing the first cell sites that actually meet the 4G standard.

And now we are starting this cycle all over again with the industry buzz about how 5G is right around the corner. But it isn’t. And I will take bets that within the next year or so one of the cellular companies is going to tell their customers they now have a 5G network.

Every once in a while somebody in the industry tells a little bit of the truth. At a Qualcomm summit recently in Hong Kong, Roger Gurnani, the EVP and chief information and technology architect at Verizon said that 5G is not a replacement for 4G and that LTE will be around for many years. And he is right, because it’s going to be at least ten years until a customer anywhere is going to be able use a cellphone that meets the full 5G standard. But there is no way that anybody at one of the cellular companies is ever going to say that.

The 4G standard was established around 2008 and we are just now seeing US cell sites that are implementing what they are labeling as LTE-Advanced, which is the first deployment that meets the full 4G standard. I say ‘about 2008’ because the effort to create the new 4G standard took two different paths with WIMAX and LTE, with different timelines. The standards for 5G are still under development and probably aren’t going to be finalized until late 2019.

How have the cellular companies been able to claim 4G all these years with a straight face (and without getting shut down by the Federal Trade Commission or hit with class action lawsuits)? The answer lies in the fact that the specifications for a standard like 4G or 5G contains a lot of different components. To use a simple analogy, if there are ten technology improvements needed to migrate from 3G to 4G, then the cellular companies started touting they had 4G after only one or two of the upgrades. But until all of the improvements have been implemented a customer cannot receive the actual promised benefits of the 4G standard.

A lot of this has to do with marketing hype. Think back to a decade ago when there was an arms race to be the first cellular company to have 4G. All the cellular commercials made 4G claims and we were bombarded by maps showing who had the best 4G coverage. But these claims were made by the marketing folks at the wireless companies and the fact is that all of those maps were a lie and nobody had 4G. Even now most people can’t get full 4G.

The cellular companies are also egged on by the cellular vendors. Right now that is all that the companies that make wireless equipment want to talk about – how they will be the first to support 5G. And so if you go to an industry forum right now that is all you will hear. I’ve noticed numerous 5G summits being announced around the world, mostly led by vendors, to talk about the next generation of cellphones for which the standards are not even finished.

I see several problems with the inflated hype from the cellular companies. First is that customers don’t see much evidence of the upgrades from one technology to another because the upgrades are made incrementally in little steps. The first customers that bought a 4G cellphone didn’t get very much faster speeds than they had on 3G.

Today the average data speeds in the US on 4G connections are just over 7 Mbps. Some customers in some instances can do much better than that, but that is the average for the billions of connections made. When 4G is finally everywhere (and full 4G may never be put into more rural cell sites) that average speed ought to creep up to about 15 Mbps as long as cell sites aren’t overloaded. The first phones cited as 5G are probably not going to do much better than 4G, but as upgrades are implemented over time the 5G speeds are supposed to creep towards 50 Mbps.

And that is the second problem I see with the inflated claims of the cellular companies. By touting that much faster cellphones are right around the corner they are causing those who would build fiber landline networks to pause. I am sure that this is on purpose – one only has to read an AT&T or Verizon press release to see that is part of their motivation. But nobody would pause in building fiber if these companies were to tell the truth and say that 50 Mbps cellphone coverage might be possible in ten years. That is the real harm from these lies.