30-50ms isn't nearly enough latency to make ssh suck. Even 225ms is fine for ssh. You almost certainly were suffering from high packet loss, which means you g

30-50ms isn't nearly enough latency to make ssh suck. Even 225ms is fine for ssh. You almost certainly were suffering from high packet loss, which means you get spikes of super high "latency" in TCP (because after a couple of packet losses, it holds off retransmitting until some time much much longer than your ping time, so you experience multi-second delays when typing). Ironically, connections that are sending bulk data (eg. downloads) don't run into this, because a lot of packets get sent at once; if one of them in the middle gets dropped, the recipient knows it right away (because the next one has the wrong sequence number) so it can immediately send an ACK that re-requests the missing one. So on a busy connection, packet loss isn't as big a problem. On an interactive connection like ssh, it's completely deadly and makes it almost unusable. All that to say: your problem with Wimax is fixable. It's not a latency problem, but nobody has fixed it yet.