Carrier recombination in CdTe quantum-dots is shown to be faster than 1ps without accumulation in long-lived states. Thermal effects influence absorption for times greater than 1ps. By eliminating those effects we demonstrate all-optical-switching at 1Tbit/s. © 2005 Optical Society of America. Uskov, A.V., O'Reilly, E.P., Manning, R.J., Webb, R.P., Cotter, D., Laemmlin, M., Ledentsov, N.N., Bimberg, D., On Ultrafast Optical Switching Based on Quantum-Dot Semiconductor Optical Amplifiers in Nonlinear Interferometers (2004) IEEE Phot. Technol. Lett., 16, pp. 1265-1267Cotter, D., Burt, M.G., Manning, R.J., Bellow-Band-Gap third-order optical nonlinearity of nanometer size semiconductor crystallites (1992) Phys. Rev. Lett., 68, pp. 1200-1203Padilha, L.A., Neves, A.A.R., Cesar, C.L., Barbosa, L.C., Brito Cruz, C.H., Recombination processes in CdTe quantum -dot-doped glasses (2004) Appl. Phys. Lett., 85, pp. 3256-3258Padilha, L.A., Neves, A.A.R., Rodriguez, E., Cesar, C.L., Barbosa, L.C., Brito Cruz, C.H., Ultrafast optical switching demonstrated with CdTe nanocrystals (2004) App. Phys. Lett., , submitted for publicationRedígolo, M.L., Arellano, W.A., Barbosa, L.C., Brito Cruz, C.H., Cesar, C.L., de Paula, A.M., Temperature dependence of the absorption spectra in CdTe-doped glasses (1999) Semicond. Sci. Tech., 14 (1), pp. 58-63