Packet-switching with little or no buffers

All-optical networks are a pipedream, so said the networking community. An Internet router needs big buffers to hold packets during times of congestion (conventional wisdom said we needed to buffer a million packets for a 10 Gb/s link) and there is no way you can build optical buffers that big. QED. It turns out the conventional wisdom was wrong: Reduce the buffering by two orders of magnitude, and both delay and jitter go down. The user is better off, and the operator doesn´t lose any throughput. Nowadays, backbone traffic is so aggregated and smooth that you could reduce buffers to just a few dozen packets. Does this mean we could deploy all-optical routers after all?.