Watch how suddenly you get 'connection reset by peer', look around and discover nobody in your packet path has any cause to reset your traffic. Now do a straight http proxy (varnish works well for this) to the same machine, run it all day night with bits of http traffic. No issues at all.

No go back to creating an SSH tunnel between your machine and the endpoint. Run traffic, note the mysterious 'connection reset by peer' when some thing upstream sends your TCP connection a FIN.

It could be that their network just has a really hard time with encrypted packets but some how I don't think so. I have tried a variety of port numbers.

EDIT: and I went back and verified I still have 'ServerAliveInterval 60' in my config file for all hosts.

Their response was that yes, they do disrupt all torrenting traffic, "because it is illegal and they must comply with copyright holders". Nevermind it was various linux distros I was trying to download and evaluate, all torrenting is automatically evil by association.

I had to switch to Cox because they're the only other option in my area. The 250GB data cap on my plan is BS, but at least I can spend that 250GB however I please.