Branch Gateways support the enhanced Rapid Spanning Tree Protocol (802.1w). The 802.1w standard is a faster and more sophisticated version of the 802.1d (STP) standard, and includes backward compatibility with 802.1d. Spanning tree makes it possible to recover connectivity after an outage within approximately a minute. RSTP, with its rapid algorithm, can usually restore connectivity to a network where a backbone link has failed in much less time.