There’s good news, and not-so-good news. The good news is the number of people accessing the network over broadband continues to increase. The not-so-good news is that the term “broadband” is so broad that it’s difficult to tell how good the good news really is.

The Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project conducted a survey of adults in the United States to determine what percentage have made the transition from archaic dial-up Internet access to more modern broadband connections. The results are that broadband access has climbed to 70 percent, while dial-up remains steady at three percent.

The problem is the things considered to be “broadband” cover a wide range of connection speeds. The actual survey question used by Pew was, “At home, do you connect to the Internet through a dial-up telephone line, or do you have some other type of connection, such as a DSL-enabled phone line, a cable TV modem, a wireless connection, or a fiber optic connection such as FIOS?”

Whether a home relies on a 3G wireless connection, a DSL connection, a cable modem connection, or happens to be lucky enough to live in an area served by Google Fiber, all these technologies are considered “broadband.” However, Google Fiber is thousands of times faster than some 3G wireless connections, so it’s a little silly to lump them together at all—never mind suggesting they’re all “high-speed broadband.”

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