Current interconnection standards providing hardware support for quality of service (QoS) consider up to 16 virtual channels (VCs) for this purpose. However, most implementations do not offer so many because VCs increase the complexity of the switch and the scheduling delays. We have shown that this number of VCs can be significantly reduced, because it is enough to use two VCs for QoS purposes at each switch port. In this paper, we explore two alternative switch designs that take advantage of this reduction.