The article is a nice bit of information about the specific event of testing slightly modified COTS IP routing gear in space. But the author totally misrepresents what this is about when he fails to strongly qualify ‘network’ everywhere so it’s obvious this is only a first for commercially, publically available routing data network via COTS gear on satellites.
Comments posted already have mentioned some of the prior space born routing networks.
The military side has certainly had routing on some of that 50%+ of satellites that have unknown capacities. And Cisco does have a "Defense, Space & Security division" as the article mentions. Commercial routing gear also undoubtedly exists also on the international space station. Maybe many routers both on the open side and in the military modules. And I’ll bet they link to the shuttles, satellites and many ground stations.
The article seems unintentionally or intentionally slanted by innuendo and incompleteness to make it seem like this may lead to the first real network routing in space.