Routing Information Protocol - 12 : Advantages and Disadvantages

This playlist provides an overview of the #Routing Information #Protocol (#RIP) used by routers and its advantages and disadvantages.

As with any protocol, RIP has advantages and disadvantages.

The advantages are:
- RIP is included in many UNIX versions, so there's nothing to buy
- It's a simple protocol

- And, it is very common

The disadvantages are:
- RIP is a very simple protocol, which restricts it to small networks. It does not work efficiently in medium and large networks
- It also is not very intelligent. RIP does not take other issues into consideration when determining where to forward packets. For example, RIP does not consider bandwidth. It sees a 10Mb link and a gigabit link as being equal. Other protocols are more intelligent and are able to take things like bandwidth into consideration before forwarding.

- And finally, RIP is slow to converge

Even though RIP has some disadvantages, it is still used because it's readily available and easy to use. We'll learn about another routing protocol, OSPF, which is more intelligent than RIP, in the next lesson.