While having concrete poured at my home, I needed to protect the fiber optic cable running from the utility pole to my house by routing it through conduit. In the process, the field-terminated Fujikura SC/APC connector on the end of the drop cable was accidentally pulled free from the cable. AT&T couldn’t dispatch a technician until Thursday, so I needed a way to bridge the gap using my iPhone 16 Pro’s cellular connection.

This guide outlines the steps to set up a Linux bridge device connected to a physical Ethernet interface with a specific VLAN tag. In this article the VLAN tag will be assumed as 170 but it can be any valid VLAN tag/id. In the world of networking, a Linux bridge device is a powerful tool that acts as a virtual switch, connecting different network segments seamlessly. It operates at the data link layer (Layer 2) of the OSI model, forwarding traffic between connected interfaces based on their MAC addresses.