Hmm...well, I was under the impression that it was called space folding, but it's been many years since I've read the books, and a long time since I even saw the movie, so I did some searching and found
this.
Apparently quite a debate about it! ;-)
To me, the "tesseract" thing is closer to the stargate idea than to hyperspace. Heinlein's Tunnel in the Sky has a similar idea, so does that Stargate movie. Hyperspace usually requires a ship to get a certain distance from the star, and then shift to another sort of space/dimension/whatever. Tesseracts can be done on Earth (or any other planet).