What is the primary benefit of route summarization in a routing table?

• A. Reducing routing table size.
• B. Increasing routing protocol convergence time.
• C. Increasing CPU load.
• D. Increasing memory usage.

Answer: (A)

Route summarization combines several networks into one larger aggregate route, so the router can represent many subnets with a single entry. The primary benefit is a smaller routing table; one summary route replaces multiple specific routes, which cuts memory usage and reduces the work the router does to perform lookups. With fewer entries, forwarding decisions are faster and routing updates travel less bandwidth, helping the network scale. For example, if several subnets in a block can be summarized to a single prefix, the router stores one route instead of many, simplifying the routing table. The other effects listed—longer convergence time or higher CPU/memory use—aren’t the goal of summarization and would not be the primary benefit.