Reassignment of calls to different wavelengths on blocking can be used in WDM networks without wavelength conversion to get almost the same performance as that of WDM networks with wavelength conversion for circuit switched traffic [11]. However, in a few networks, we did find that while the reassignment on blocking does improve the performance of WDM networks without wavelength conversion, the performance falls short of that of wavelength conversion networks. In this paper, we analyze the reasons for this behavior in these networks. On identifying certain critical nodes as a cause of this behavior, we propose a rerouting technique around the critical node. With a small amount of rerouting, this bottleneck can be removed and the performance of WDM networks without wavelength conversion becomes almost equal to that of networks with wavelength conversion, thus making the wavelength conversion (costly) feature, as redundant. In this paper, we also propose a technique to carry out seamless wavelength reassignment so as not to disrupt traffic during the wavelength reassignment process. © 2008 IEEE.