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Networking & Telecommunications vocabulary · Routing and Switching

Trunk port

Meaning in networking & telecommunications, with examples

nounCommon term

In networking & telecommunications, trunk port means: A switch port that carries traffic for several VLANs over one link, adding a tag to each frame so the device at the other end knows which VLAN it belongs to.

In Turkish: trunk port, etiketli port

How it is used

Used for links between switches and to routers, firewalls and virtualisation hosts. The opposite is an access port, which carries a single VLAN for an end device. 'Trunk' is mostly Cisco wording; other vendors often say 'tagged port'. Tagging follows the IEEE 802.1Q standard.

Example sentences

  1. VLAN 30 isn't allowed on the trunk port to the second floor, so those phones can't register.

  2. Configure the uplink as a trunk port and allow VLANs 10, 20 and 30.

Common collocations

  • configure a trunk port
  • trunk link
  • allowed VLANs
  • access port
  • native VLAN
  • VLANShort for virtual LAN: a separate logical network created on a switch, so that devices plugged into the same hardware, for example staff PCs, guests and cameras, can be kept apart.
  • switchA device with many ports that connects computers, phones, printers and other equipment inside the same local network and forwards each frame only to the port where its destination is.
  • spanning tree protocolA protocol that stops switches from forming loops by blocking extra paths between them, and opens a blocked path again if an active link fails.
  • MAC addressA hardware address, usually set in a network card at the factory, that identifies a device on a local network; it has 48 bits and is written as six pairs of hexadecimal digits.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Routing and Switching

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