Hot-potato and Cold-potato Routing - Cold-potato Routing

Cold-potato Routing

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 quality of service to their customers. It can also be preferred when connecting to content providers; if content providers use hot-potato routing, they may escape from paying for the cost of links between cities.

Cold-potato routing is prone to misconfiguration as well as poor coordination between two networks. In such scenarios, packets can be routed further distances as well as allow another autonomous system to manipulate routing in your network for various purposes. Cold-potato routing requires a level of trust between two networks that either side will not attempt to "cheat" the other.

Some content networks favor the use of cold-potato routing (multi exit discriminator exchange/honoring) in order to deliver content from replicated server farms closer to the end-user.