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

Post Views: 516 Most 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

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Why Broadband Technicians and Network Engineers Should Install WSL

Post Views: 349 If 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

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

Post Views: 485 The 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

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

Post Views: 663 For 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

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

Post Views: 588 TLS 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

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What is MPTS? Plus a hands-on Lab

Post Views: 514 MPTS 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.

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Brief Evolution of Net Neutrality in the US

Post Views: 1,338 Net 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

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Mapping ABR to TCP Congestion Control and QUIC

Post Views: 1,312 I 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

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What Is Adaptive Bitrate Streaming (ABR)?

Post Views: 1,484 Adaptive 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

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What is TCP CUBIC and Why so popular?

Post Views: 3,385 Most 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

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Zero-Trust Networking & Converged Security

Post Views: 1,953 The following is a technical SWOT analysis for Network Engineers, Security Engineers, and Senior Technicians. I apologize for the high number of acronyms used below, but hey, this is networking! In networking, Zero-Trust is not a single product or control. It’s an architecture and operating model where no network location (LAN, WAN,

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High-Speed Ethernet for AI and Data Centers

Post Views: 1,841 What I have created here is a somewhat technical SWOT Analysis for Network Engineers and Technicians for one of today’s top networking subjects of interest: the high speed needs being delivered by Ethernet technology for AI and for Data Centers. Introduction: Why High-Speed Ethernet Matters in AI Infrastructure High-Speed Ethernet has become

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