Users in a branch office report very slow Internet access. When the network technician examines the primary router, the routing table shows that the 0.0.0.0/0 entry is pointing to the wrong next-hop address. Which of the following is the most likely impact of this incorrect default route on the network?
Packets destined for unknown networks are forwarded to the wrong gateway, causing delayed or failed access to external resources.
Hosts on the LAN will begin reporting duplicate IP-address conflicts.
Switch ports will detect a spanning-tree loop and go into a blocking state, resulting in broadcast storms.
The DHCP server will quickly exhaust its address pool and stop leasing new addresses.
The default route is used whenever a destination network is not found elsewhere in the routing table. If it points to the wrong next-hop, packets destined for the Internet (or any unknown network) will be forwarded toward an unreachable or incorrect gateway. The result is that external resources become slow or unreachable while internal LAN traffic is unaffected. Duplicate-IP errors, spanning-tree loops, and DHCP scope exhaustion are unrelated to the default-route setting, so those choices are incorrect.
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What is a default route in networking?
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What happens when the default route points to the wrong next-hop address?
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How is the default route different from other static routes in a routing table?