The CellStream Blog

Welcome to the CellStream Blog, your trusted source for networking, telecommunications, broadband, Wireshark, and Internet technology insights. Our articles are designed to help engineers, technicians, IT professionals, and technology enthusiasts deepen their knowledge, sharpen their troubleshooting skills, and stay current with emerging industry trends.

From practical how-to guides and protocol deep dives to real-world troubleshooting techniques and expert analysis, we provide content that bridges theory and application. Whether you’re exploring new technologies, solving complex network challenges, or advancing your professional expertise, the CellStream Blog delivers actionable knowledge you can apply immediately. Join us as we share decades of industry experience to help you learn, analyze, troubleshoot, and succeed.

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Why Broadband Service Provider Technical Teams Should Be Using Linux in 2026

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Views: 2,356Originally published August 7, 2018 | Updated October 2026 Several years ago, during a video call with a service provider technical lead, I noticed something interesting. Almost every question I answered, whether it concerned Wi-Fi, network testing, troubleshooting, or packet analysis, involved demonstrating something on my Linux laptop. Eventually, the technical lead asked why

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The FAA Had a Backup Fiber Path. So Why Did Air Traffic Still Go Dark?

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Views: 962Yesterday (9/21/2026) provided one of those networking lessons that is difficult to ignore. A telecommunications failure disrupted air traffic across one of the busiest regions in the United States. Flights were stopped or delayed at Newark Liberty, JFK, LaGuardia, Philadelphia and other airports after communications problems developed at the FAA’s Philadelphia Terminal Radar Approach

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Stop Rating Technical Training Like an Uber Ride

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Views: 326I recently made this comment about teaching: When you teach classes on highly technical subjects with hands-on labs, you get evaluated every class. That can be two times a week. Evaluations are from people you have just met. Evaluations are specific to the class and content being taught, and are heavily influenced by the

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I Asked AI to Evaluate this (my) Content/Site

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Views: 365As I have begun to master AI – not to eliminate the human race (duh) – but to help me solve networking issues, correct errors, improve understanding, etc., and experiencing the tremendous improvement of AI in general (anyone that says “AI is usually inaccurate” is not up to date and you can disregard anything

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The Wireshark # Operator: Filter the Inner vs. Outer IP Header

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Views: 880Most Wireshark filters assume there is only one IP header in a packet. For example: ip.src == 10.1.1.10 works perfectly well in ordinary traffic. But what happens when the packet contains more than one IP header? That is common with technologies such as: A tunneled packet might look like this structure: Now we have

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Why Broadband Technicians and Network Engineers Should Install WSL

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Views: 646If you work in broadband or networking and use a Windows laptop, you probably already have a pretty capable troubleshooting platform. Windows gives you tools such as ping, tracert, nslookup, PowerShell, SSH, and a growing collection of useful networking commands. Add Wireshark, Nmap, and a few other utilities and you can do quite a

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Net Neutrality Versus Intelligent Traffic Differentiation: Fairness, Performance, or Both?

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Views: 685The phrase net neutrality is often summarized as the principle that all Internet traffic should be treated equally. That definition is appealing, but technically lacking and incomplete. Modern networks do not—and often should not—treat every packet identically. The subject itself is not new around here and you can view my other posts on the

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AI-Controlled and Autonomous Networks: Efficiency Breakthrough or Unacceptable Operational Risk?

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Views: 972For decades, network automation meant converting a human-designed, generally manual, memorized or scripted procedure into a repeatable process. An engineer decided what should happen, defined the required steps, tested the process, and authorized the “automation” to execute those steps. The automation might provision a VLAN, update a routing policy, restart a failed service, backup

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End-to-End Encryption: A Privacy Victory or a Networking Blind Spot?

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Views: 854TLS 1.3, QUIC, HTTP/3, encrypted DNS, and Encrypted Client Hello increasingly conceal application and transport information that network operators traditionally used for troubleshooting, security inspection, filtering, performance optimization, and policy enforcement. Here is a little reference chart: This produces two defensible but conflicting positions: For most of the Internet’s history, and certainly for my

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What is MPTS? Plus a hands-on Lab

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Views: 780MPTS stands for Multi-Program Transport Stream. It is a format defined within MPEG-2 Transport Stream (MPEG-TS) standards where multiple independent programs (channels) are multiplexed into a single transport stream. A simple definition would be one MPTS carries multiple programs with each program containing a complete service of video plus audio plus metadata. Think of

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Brief Evolution of Net Neutrality in the US

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Views: 1,549Net neutrality in the United States has evolved through a cycle of regulatory assertion, legal limitation, reclassification, repeal, and attempted reinstatement. It is not a fixed policy but a dynamic framework shaped by the intersection of law, politics, and network engineering realities. At its core, the debate reflects a fundamental tension. On one side

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Mapping ABR to TCP Congestion Control and QUIC

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Views: 1,670I described what Adaptive Bit Rate Streaming (ABR) is in my prior article, if you need that background. Also there is an ABR Lab Exercise if you want some hands on learning with ABR that will show you visually some of the items discussed below. Here, I wanted to dive a little deeper into

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What Is Adaptive Bitrate Streaming (ABR)?

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Views: 1,963Adaptive Bitrate Streaming (ABR) is a video delivery method that dynamically adjusts the quality of a stream in real time based on three things: network conditions, device capability, and player performance. Instead of delivering a single fixed-quality, and therefore fixed transfer rate video, ABR continuously selects the most appropriate bitrate to maintain smooth playback

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What is TCP CUBIC and Why so popular?

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Views: 4,008Most people do not know this, but TCP CUBIC is the dominant congestion control algorithm used in modern TCP/IP networks. It is designed to efficiently utilize high-speed, long-distance links while maintaining fairness across flows with different round-trip times (RTTs). Today, it is the default congestion control algorithm in most Linux systems, and since most

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