Hot-potato routing
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In the jargon of routing technology, hot-potato routing is routing that forwards the packet towards the path with the lowest delay (as opposed, for example, to the more commonly used metric of least number of hops).
In commercial network routing between autonomous systems, hot-potato routing is the practice of passing traffic off to another AS as quickly as possible, thus using their network for wide-area transit. Cold-potato routing is the opposite, where the originating AS holds onto the packet until it is as near to the destination as possible.
Hot-potato routing is a cheapskate's approach to routing, and generally results in lower quality of service. Cold-potato routing, on the other hand, is more expensive to do, but keeps the traffic under your control for longer, allowing operators of well-provisioned networks to offer a higher QoS to their customers.
The terms can also be used to describe the route announcement policy of a network: by choosing to announce their network at a large number of points at the periphery of another AS, a provider can pull incoming traffic onto their network as soon as possible, ensuring that the traffic stays on their network all the way to their customer's connection.