Act Now, Before Your Tubes Are Tied Up

If you can read this, there is still time. I am selling off portions of my spectrum and you need to get some now, before the interweb wireless tubes become so clogged you can no longer contact me to negotiate what, at that point, will be exorbitant prices for my piece of the ether.

“U.S. wireless companies are running out of space.” Mock Ted Stevens all you want; he was right: “the internet is a series of tubes” and those tubes are going to get filled. To help alleviate this, the FCC has proposed rules to allow “a wireless provider holding licenses for more airwaves, or spectrum, than needed can more easily lease that spectrum to another provider.”

You must realize that this does not increase the number of tubes or the size of those tubes. When the tubes are filled, your wireless communication is going to get jammed up in there, no matter how nicely the providers are sharing. And that is where I can help you.

As the owner of a Blackberry and a wireless modem and the financial backer of a college student, I figure that the wireless providers supporting all our devices are estimating some given amount of usage for each device when they lease their share of the spectrum. I, however, won't ever use as much as the average spectrum consumer and I'm willing to sell some of my spectrum to you.

It’s not that I can’t use it; it’s just that I can’t handle it. Last night I was using my wireless connection to figure out some hotel reservations. At the same time, on Facebook, I was simultaneously playing chess and chatting with my daughter’s boyfriend. Meanwhile, on gmail, my daughter was iming with me while my niece was emailing me. I nearly had a nervous breakdown.

What’s in this deal for me is that I can tell them, “Hey, one at a time; I sold most of spectrum in order to pay the daughter’s tuition and we have to go back to communicating as we did in the dark ages of the 20th century, with telephone land lines and snail mail from the US Postal Service.” What’s in it for you is more spectrum

At least six times now I have used “spectrum”, a word I didn’t even know about (in the context of wireless communication) before I started writing this. I was just getting used to “bandwidth”, which, up until last year, I thought referred to the size of the red indentations my love handles develop where the elastic on my underwear digs into my flesh.

The fact that I don’t know anything about spectrum doesn’t mean I can’t sell it. I will bet you that half the people working at Sprint can’t tell you what “3G” means, but they can convince you that you must possess it. I am also figuring out ways to acquire more spectrum.

I swore I would never buy that digital book reading device, the Kindle, until it came out in paperback. Or maybe I would just go to the used digital book store and get some other people’s cast offs. But now, savvy investor that I am, I am buying up Kindles by the bundles. That means that some wireless provider is setting aside a massive amount of spectrum to handle my book downloading needs. I have to assume that a whole book takes up more space in the tubes that several months’ worth of Facebook status updates or twitter tweets. All that spectrum they are leasing for my needs, I will sell to you.

Don’t think that this is some doomsday, 2012, prophetic scam. This morning I tried to get on twitter and got the message “twitter is full. Too many tweets. Twy again later.” I am not kidding. I know, you are wondering why I was on twitter. See, the deli down the block from where I work tweets their lunch menu every morning and that way I can see if it’s worth walking a block in the snow to go there.

That being the only use I can see for the service, I can’t imagine how twitter could get “full”. It must have been Chad Ocho Cinco and Meghan McCain that brought it down.

I’m’a give Chad a call and see if he’s interested in buying up my surplus spectrum. So, if you want some before it’s gone, tweet me at johnnyb144 and let me know how many tubes you need.