A communication network (100) has a plurality of cell-based routers (104), a plurality of frame-based routers (108), and a bidirectional cell and frame based switch (110) coupled to the cell-based routers, and frame-based routers. Each of the cell-based routers is programmed to reshape (204) traffic bandwidth to avoid packet losses at the frame-based routers, and route (206) cell-based traffic to the bidirectional cell and frame based switch according to the updated bandwidth.