In this paper, we present a new hybrid optical burst switch architecture (HOBS) that takes advantage of the pre-transmission idle time during lightpath establishment. In dynamic circuit switching (wavelength routing) networks, capacity is immediately hardreserved upon the arrival of a setup message at a node, but it is used at least a round-trip time delay later. This waste of resources is significant in optical multi-gigabit networks and can be used to transmit traffic of a lower class of service in a non-competing way. The proposed hybrid OBS architecture, takes advantage of this idle time to transmit one-way optical bursts of a lower class of service, while high priority data explicitly requests and establishes end-to-end lightpaths. In the proposed scheme, the two control planes (two-way and one-way OBS reservation) are merged, in the sense that each SETUP message, used for the two-way lightpath establishment, is associated with one-way burst transmission and therefore it is modif...