Which routing protocol to use?

OSPF supports a concept known as areas that allow a network to scale quite well. EIGRP does not supports areas

For your size of network EIGRP will be fine and is very easily to configure and troubleshoot.

Since your network will be hub and spoke, I would suggest you make use of the EIGRP stub feature - see

Thanks...we are going for a hub and spoke system because leased lines between all sites would be too expensive, and there is also no direct need for a site to have a direct connection with another site, although this also means that if their leased line goes down, they are communicationless.

Are there ways around this?

For 12 sites doing hub-and-spoke, I'd still be doing static routing. I don't see much need for a dynamic routing protocol in this network configuration unless you feel like learning one.

I'd keep the VPN's up as backup and use statics/costed statics as Doug recomended. No need for a protocol, simple enough network.

Thanks for the replies...we did consider static routing, but the company (and therefore network) is expected to grow rapidly in the future, so we wanted whatever solution we implemented to be scaleable. What we do know is that the routers we use will always be Cisco, therefore it was a toss up between EIGRP and OSPF.

I think we'll go for EIGRP...thanks again.

SJ