is Verizon high speed dsl internet really that fast?

[Zarn]

There's a difference between MBps and Mbps. The first is MegaByte (my emphasis) per second, and the second's MegaBit (again, my emphasis) per second. Mbps is often misspelled as mbps, which is wrong.

The difference between the two is about a factor of 10 (technically, it's 8, and there's a few other factors at play here) - so if you're connected by 5 Mbps, that'll be about 0.5 MBps. See how they differ by only one letter? Given that you only have one capitalization in your post, I think you may be confusing units here, quite simply.