When this first happened to me I thought it was just a one off oddity but yesterday when I returned on the ferry from France I saw *exactly* the same symptoms on two entirely different systems. It's hardly a big issue either just an inconvenience but I'd love to know why it happens.
On the DFDS ferries there is free WiFi available, no hassle, no login required, just an open SSID called DFDS-Pax. My laptop (running Ubuntu 13.10) and my tablet (Android 4.x) both connect to it quite happily.
It's reasonably usable as well, hardly lightning fast, but fine for browsing web pages etc.
However if I try and connect (from either tablet or laptop) using ssh it starts off OK but after some hundreds of characters it just slows down and stops never to pass another character. If I open another ssh session from the same device the same thing happens, i.e. it gets another few hundred characters through. It's not very consistent, sometimes it doesn't even manage to complete the ssh handshake sequence, but most times it gets to a command prompt and allows me a couple of commands before going to sleep. Anything that generates a lot of traffic (like starting up mutt) always hangs before it gets anywhere but a couple of 'ls' commands will sometimes work.
So what might be going on? It's not like ssh protocol is blocked completely so it's not that the port(s) are blocked, it's almost as if there's someone watching and, when they can't see what's being transferred, they stop the data.
Any ideas anyone? I suppose I could try a different port for ssh but as it's not specific port blocking I don't think this will fix it.
... and as I said, it's not very important, I don't often want to read my E-Mail while crossing the channel! :-) I'm just curious.