A network engineer in Charlotte showed me why VLAN tagging matters the hard way

I was setting up a new network for a client last Tuesday and couldn't figure out why their VoIP phones kept dropping calls. A guy named Dave from a managed service provider across town walked me through tagging on the switch ports and it fixed everything in 10 minutes. He said 'your phones and data are fighting for the same lane without proper tags.' Anyone else run into weird issues just because of untagged traffic?

2 comments

2 Comments

noahs8226d ago

That "your phones and data are fighting for the same lane" line is spot on. I had a similar mess a couple years back when I tried to set up a guest WiFi network at my buddy's bar. His point of sale systems would randomly freeze up and nobody could figure out why. I ended up tagging the guest traffic as VLAN 10 and the POS stuff as VLAN 20 on the same switch. It was like magic how everything just worked after that. The whole thing took maybe 20 minutes once I actually understood what I was doing. But man, before that I wasted a whole weekend trying to swap cables and reset routers.

linda_butler2820d ago

Check your DHCP scope and switch config first, saved me three days last month.