Following from yesterday's post, correspondence with our Nortel expert has yielded a few interesting points, but no complete solution:
If the phone were to accept packets addressed to its MAC address regardless of the presence or absence of the 802.1Q tag, we could set the edge switch to strip all tags on egress, and everything would work. Pity the SOPHO Dterm doesn't do that....
More recent versions of the Passport 8600's firmware can untag frames from the PVID and leave all other frames tagged. However, few of us are directly connected to an 8600....
config ethernet <ports> untag-port-default-vlan enable
Anyway, we now understand the issue fairly thoroughly and can work around it. The phones that we've deployed are working very well so far.
