>And this has been their defense all along
I don't think it's any defense - it's plain fact. You're going to have to interopate with other networks. BGP is the protocol franca for doing so (until another rolls along). You can draft a spec, or add capabilities to BGP, but at some point your network needs to speak the same language as others or it's just an island.
>There are BGP alternatives on deck. What we don’t need is high profile network engineers speaking out against them and in favor of the status quo. The truth is, networking is the one part of the industry that isn’t improving at the same pace as the rest. And all the improvements that are happening seem to be related to single links and switching, whereas the defense of networking dogma is related to routing. According to the holy bible of networking, switching is easy, routing is hard. Routers must be memory restricted with small memory footprints to artificially create SKUs. Routers must operate on multi-minute timers rather than seconds. Building routing tables is an insanely intense and time consuming process. Blah blah blah.
I don't know where you're seeing this. The rage around Clos networks has sent everyone after small table SoC's. Any one operating at scale is running some form of commodity (aka, BRCM) chip as a router.
And when you get to routers, the Jericho (purchased by Broadcom, found in the Cisco NCS) or the Juniper Paradise (found in the PTX) are both capable of taking in internet routing tables using either HMC or off-chip memory in a pizza box form factor and in a fixed pipeline chip. Your statements aren't aligning with the reality of the platforms available today.
>Another smell that should make this obvious to everyone is that almost every major company has had high level engineers make some statement of how network companies are ripping you off, and explaining how they bought white box network solutions that route layer 3 at wire speed, converge rapidly, and have tons of memory.
This last part reads like the grass is always greener, and doesn't consider a lot of the hard work and time that goes into developing network hardware.
First, conflation: White box can entail NPUs or ASICs, which have different implications on FIB memory - the majority of these major company (read: FB, MSFT, GOOG, AMZN) use ASICs with some on-chip memory (in the dozens of MB at best). Convergence speed is primarily driven by the network operating system and it's protocol implementation (aka, something you need to write, or contract out to a vendor)
What those high level engineers don't tell you is how hard it is to create white box solutions. And they aren't vendor free paradises either - you have to sign a NDA with the chip manufacturer and use their SDK. All of those things like implementing counters, make before break, prioritization, control-plane and data-plane interfaces are up to you. And when that's all done, you need to perform countless hours of testing.