The biggest advantage of using RIP is that it is relatively simple to understand and to implement, and it has been the de facto routing standard for many years.
A limit of 15 hops between the source and destination networks
A large amount of bandwidth taken up by periodic broadcasts of the entire routing table
Slow convergence
Routing decisions based on hop count; no concept of link costs or delay
Flat networks; no concept of areas or boundaries
No limitation on hop count
Route updates multicast only when changes occur
Faster convergence
Support for load balancing to multiple routers based on the actual cost of the link
Support for hierarchical topologies where the network is divided into areas
The details of RIP are explained later in this chapter.