Chipmaker Intel said this week that despite its record US$10.2 billion in revenue for the third quarter, the company is worried that the global economic crisis will affect future performance. Despite such a general malaise across the industry, however, there is some very good news on the tech front.
Buried under the cloud of economic fears, bandwidth prices for backbone transit are declining across the globe. For instance, as Ryan Radia from the Competitive Enterprise Institute has pointed out, “In San Francisco, the price per mbps of Gigabit Ethernet transit has dropped 38 percent in the past 12 months. Developing countries are also enjoying substantial price cuts in 15 to 20 percent range.”
This means that the high-speed commercial data services that we all rely upon are getting cheaper, which may also give a boost to the growing Internet video industry. And it’s not just electronic data services that are dropping in price.
Perhaps one of the best pieces of news overshadowed by the economic crisis was the announcement by Mountain View, Calif.-based Complete Genomics that it is able to sequence an entire human genome for $1,000 in material costs, and will sell it for $5,000 to cover its labor and other costs.
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