This podcast is made by Ran Chen, who holds an EA license, Insurance and Securities licenses (Series 6, 63, 65), and the CFP® designation. He is passionate about opening access to high-quality exam preparation resources and helping learners prepare more effectively for professional certification exams.

In this episode you will learn:

- The OSPF cost formula is Reference Bandwidth divided by Interface Bandwidth, with lower cumulative costs being preferred.

- The default reference bandwidth of 100 Mbps creates a common exam trap, causing links faster than 100 Mbps to have an identical cost of 1.

- How to fix the default cost issue network-wide using the `auto-cost reference-bandwidth` command in router configuration mode.

- How to manually override the calculated cost for specific path engineering using the `ip ospf cost` command on an interface.

- That the reference bandwidth must be set consistently across all routers in the OSPF domain to ensure accurate and predictable path selection.

For more free exam prep tools, practice questions, and AI-powered explanations, visit https://open-exam-prep.com/ or YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Open-exam-prep