Last week I got into an interesting discussion about the pros and cons of email marketing in Canada versus the US. The idiosyncrasies of Quebec's francophone market also came up in the discussion. As a group of professionals, we were all a little thrown that we didn't have enough specific answers and could each cite enough stats to confuse the heck out of each other.
Over the next couple of weeks I'm going to do my best to shed a little light on this matter and share it with you.
First things first - access and specifically broadband - at home verses the office.
It appears that some folks in the US are displeased with access to broadband. The President promised country-wide coverage for 2007 but that didn't/ won't happen. Still, I suppose he'll claim to have kept that one, as technically with satellite connections it's mostly possible. ... but who can afford those.
Something like 55% of Americans have access to high-speed but the apparent problem is that the percentage of users who have this at home is pretty poor. While marketers and media outlets are happy to reach folks while they are at work, in reality they want the households.
In Canada the percentage number is a little higher - 65% is the latest count I've managed to dig up. Still it's not what you'd hope for especially when you consider that other countries, especially in Asia, not only have higher percentages using broadband, but the speed they are surfing at is often quadruple the bandwidth in North America. I'm lucky, I've got an average of 7 megs download and a very stable connection. But DSL speeds in my area, those advertised as "high-speed" don't really come up to scratch. A 2 meg connection really doesn't cut it. How can anyone talk about streaming content to that market?
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