Should VLAN tagging occur at the initial ingress point or farther upstream? Any issues to not doing it at the immediate source? Is this creating potential problems?
For example. Downstream 5.8GHz SM’s connect to an upstream 5.8 AP which connects using a Coverage Extender to an upstream 5.4 SM and ultimately back to the 5.4 AP. The 5.8SM’s have a VLAN Untagged Ingress VID of 1 and rely on the 5.4 SM to tag the traffic farther upstream, say VID of 200.
Sure, there are a few reasons I can think of to tag as soon as it comes off of the customer
- VLAN1 tends to be reserved on most switches, often carries protocols you don’t want customers seeing like CDP
- allows for multiple VLANS hanging off of the same AP
- VLAN re-tagging often requires burning through two switch ports
- some devices software-switch untagged frames when operating in an 802.1q mode resulting in performance issues
- it is good practice for consistency and avoiding confusion