Why is the maximum hop count of 15 used in RIP, and what happens to routes with more hops?

• A. To speed up convergence; routes with 16 hops are considered optimal.
• B. To reduce bandwidth usage; 16-hop routes are preferred.
• C. To simplify routing tables; only 15-hop routes are stored.
• D. To limit loops; routes with 16 hops are considered unreachable.

Answer: (D)

RIP uses hop count as its distance metric, counting each hop to reach a destination. To keep things simple and prevent looping in small networks, it defines 16 as infinity. This means any route that would take more than 15 hops is treated as unreachable. If a potential path ends up with a hop count of 16, that route is not considered valid and is advertised as unreachable, which stops the spread of looping or invalid routes. This design helps RIP converge to a stable view of the network by ensuring that paths exceeding 15 hops cannot be used.

Other options miss the point because RIP isn’t about speeding up convergence or prioritizing 16-hop routes for bandwidth reasons, and it doesn’t store only 15-hop routes as a rule; it simply marks routes with more than 15 hops as unreachable.