copying files by using cat on a network interface ?

Question

when using scp to copy files over ssh connection , it can be sometimes quite slow for me (a 12 meg file takes 1 or 2 minutes). once i saw a guy cancel a copy that was going too slow, and then copy it by some other method that was like catting the file directly to the network adapter or something magical .. (i was new to linux at the time so didn't realise how cool that was until now, otherwise i would have asked the guy!)

how did he do that??

Answer 1

As to why scp is slow, I just found this. As to what you observed, perhaps it was Netcat?