The oldest routing protocol, and the oldest distance-vector protocol, is version 1 of the Routing Information Protocol (RIPv1). RIPv1 was formally standardised in 1988. It establishes the shortest path across a network purely on the basis of the hops, that is numbers of routers that need to be passed to reach the destination network. RIP is an interior gateway protocol, so it can be used in local area networks (LANs) on interior or border routers. Routers with RIPv1 implementation exchange their routing tables with neighbouring routers by broadcasting a RIPv1 packet every 30 second into all connected networks. RIPv1 is not suitable for large networks as it limits the number of hops to 15. This hop limit was introduced to avoid routing loops, but also means that networks that are connected through more than 15 routers are unreachable.