Religious arguments aside, we are getting superb performance across
the OC3 vBNS ATM network nationally for quite some time already,
though big buffers had been architected in there from the beginning.
Check on www.vbns.net and www.nlanr.net. Can't beat Jon's workstation
performance yet, unless we talk about bandwidth*miles. 
Then again,
that may change some time as well. Stay tuned.