You raise some interesting points. 1) What makes it look like the project is no longer maintained? The latest patch release on the website is for 5.8p1 -- this is just 1 point beneath current (http://openbsd.org.ar/pub/OpenBSD/OpenSSH/portable/). 2) Great question. I would be interested in seeing the response this gets from the FBSD mailing list. 3) It is true that it is challenging (or rare) to get public internet speeds that will make HPN worthwhile, however I find HPN most useful on a LAN (typically within the same datacenter). I perform most of my data replication with rsync over HPN-SSH. It's multi-threaded and generally cuts CPU load over time. Thanks for linking to that thread over on LWN -- that was an interesting read.