Does Qwest still do Cold-Potato Routing?

This is somewhat of a rhetorical question, but I do question it. Qwest has always (AFAIK) advertised and bragged about this feature with their DIA services.

First, some may be wondering, what the heck is Cold-Potato Routing? The best explanation may be that it is the opposite of Hot-Potato routing in which an ISP will hand off it packets to a peer or downstream ISP as soon as possible to get it off of their system. So, in Cold-Potato routing, the well intentioned ISP will hold onto the traffic and haul it across a geographic region as far as possible before handing it over to the downstream provider. This provides a best end-to-end quality of service for the ISP customers, assuming the ISP has the backbone to handle it.

The reason I question weather Qwest is still providing Cold-potato routing is that if I trace routes from my Los Angeles based POP (Qwest provided) to my co-lo in Chicago, IL the traffic gets handed off in Los Angeles to Level 3. net. Level3 then hauls it across the country to it's Chicago facility. Now, I know that Qwest has a big OC-192 backbone direct from their Burbank, CA TeraPOP direct to Chicago, IL TeraPOP. So, what the heck? Can anyone shine some light on this issue?