Refer to the exhibit. Clients are reporting an issue with the voice traffic from the branch site to the central site. What is the cause of this issue?

Routing loops cause packets to repeatedly traverse the same path or circulate endlessly within a network, leading to excessive delays, packet duplication, and eventual packet drops. For real-time applications like voice traffic, this directly results in severe quality degradation, one-way audio, or complete call failures due to the inability of packets to reach their destination reliably.

While high delay on WAN links certainly impacts voice quality, it describes an effect rather than the root cause; a routing loop is a more fundamental network issue that directly causes such delays and prevents proper packet delivery.

Traffic load-balancing over multiple links can cause out-of-order packets, which some voice applications can tolerate to a degree or correct, but a routing loop is a more catastrophic failure that prevents traffic from reaching its destination effectively.

Voice traffic using a link with less available bandwidth would lead to congestion and potential packet loss, resulting in poor quality, but a routing loop implies a fundamental pathing problem rather than just a capacity issue.