loolooyyyy,
I don't know why you assume that your ISP is pouring molasses in your tunnel. It's more likely that the combination of low throughput and encryption overhead is slowing things down. Do a "man ssh" to read about the options. In particular, the man page describes the compression option and the cipher option. You can experiment with the following.
This command says, "use gzip compression with the Blowfish cipher, and dump debug info to the screen". From the man page: "Compression is desirable on modem lines and other slow connections, but will only slow down things on fast networks."
Code:
[user@host1 ~]$ ssh -vv -C -c blowfish user@host2
This command says "use the Blowfish cipher and dump debug info to the screen". Again, from the man page: "blowfish is a fast block cipher; it appears very secure and is much faster than 3des." Some people have noticed a measurable performance improvement after switching to Blowfish encryption from triple DES or AES.
Code:
[user@host1 ~]$ ssh -vv -c blowfish user@host2
Good luck.