Before identifying the benefits of dynamic routing protocols, consider the reasons why network professionals use static routing. Dynamic routing certainly has several advantages over static routing; however, static routing is still used in networks today. In fact, networks typically use a combination of both static and dynamic routing.
Static routing has several primary uses, including:
- Providing ease of routing table maintenance in smaller networks that are not expected to grow significantly.
- Routing to and from a stub network, which is a network with only one default route out and no knowledge of any remote networks.
- Accessing a single default route (which is used to represent a path to any network that does not have a more specific match with another route in the routing table).
The figure provides a sample scenario of static routing.