Actually its not the ordering thats the problem per-say its "packets in flight" Each packet needs to be accounted for, and only a certain amount of packets can

Actually its not the ordering thats the problem per-say its "packets in flight" Each packet needs to be accounted for, and only a certain amount of packets can be unaccounted for "in flight" before TCP starts throttling back. This means the higher the latency, the lower number of packets a second can be transmitted. The problem is that making a reliable transport protocol that's also fast, efficient and plays nicely on a congested network is really quite hard. (this is why aspera can charge as much as they do for what is effectively a thin wrapper around scp.) There are a couple of ways to get fast throughput over high throughput/lossy links, the easiest is to use multiple connections. I wrote a python library that does just that. Between london and Sanfran you can expect about 12megabits a second(up to about 25 burst), with 20 concurrent connection I could get just over 150 megabits a second(I hit vpn limits then).