Configuring VLANs 567
the switch can differentiate between customers in the MAN while preserving 
an individual customer’s VLAN identification when the traffic enters the 
customer’s 802.1Q domain.
With the introduction of this second tag, customers are no longer required to 
divide the 4-byte VLAN ID space to send traffic on a Ethernet-based MAN. 
In short, every frame that is transmitted from an interface has a double-VLAN 
tag attached, while every packet that is received from an interface has a tag 
removed (if one or more tags are present).
In Figure 21-2, two customers share the same metro core. The service 
provider assigns each customer a unique ID so that the provider can 
distinguish between the two customers and apply different rules to each. 
When the configurable EtherType is assigned to something different than the 
802.1Q (0x8100) EtherType, it allows the traffic to have added security from 
misconfiguration while exiting the metro core. For example, if the edge 
device on the other side of the metro core is not stripping the second tag, the 
packet would never be classified as a 802.1Q tag, so the packet would be 
dropped rather than forwarded in the incorrect VLAN.