git fails on large repo clone on intermittent, or intermittently-high-latency, connections

Hi, I am trying to clone opentaps.git. The following is my third try,
and I am giving up now. As you can see I pressed <Return> every now
and then, and for the last long while, absolutely nothing downloading
- the connection has clearly died once again. My last run was
yesterday and I left it run overnight.

I cannot download (with a git clone/ initial repo), more than roughly 100MiB. I am on a satellite connection. I have also experienced this with wireless connection about 18 months ago.

I have in the middle there (a few months ago) spent a couple months at a friend's place, and never had the same problem - nice ADSL2+ connection, ~1.5MiB/s connections. As you can see with my satellite (rural) and also with my older wireless (also rural) connections, I do not get more than about 64KiB/s, but it's usually slower, and I've always had satellite latency issues in the order of 450ms, and sometimes the odd dropout.

As opposed to git, wget on the other hand not only retries and continues from where it left off when it retries (HTTP protocol) (default retry 10 times I think), but I can completely INTerrupt wget, and start it again from an entirely different computer if I want (using wget's --continue option), and it will (with HTTP) happily continue right where it left off, and eventually my download completes.

NOT so with git! :

$ git clone git://gitorious.org/opentaps/opentaps.git opentaps.git Cloning into opentaps.git... remote: Counting objects: 105724, done. remote: Compressing objects: 100% (30417/30417), done. Receiving objects: 5% (5888/105724), 10.44 MiB | 21 KiB/s Receiving objects: 5% (5898/105724), 12.18 MiB | 51 KiB/s Receiving objects: 5% (5920/105724), 17.47 MiB | 38 KiB/s Receiving objects: 5% (5923/105724), 19.64 MiB | 23 KiB/s Receiving objects: 5% (5939/105724), 30.01 MiB | 27 KiB/s Receiving objects: 5% (6184/105724), 41.00 MiB | 47 KiB/s Receiving objects: 7% (7818/105724), 52.77 MiB | 58 KiB/s Receiving objects: 8% (9170/105724), 67.66 MiB | 56 KiB/s Receiving objects: 10% (11309/105724), 70.57 MiB | 24 KiB/s Receiving objects: 12% (13413/105724), 82.43 MiB | 29 KiB/s Receiving objects: 12% (13495/105724), 96.81 MiB | 39 KiB/s Receiving objects: 12% (13495/105724), 101.57 MiB | 47 KiB/s Receiving objects: 12% (13523/105724), 142.64 MiB | 27 KiB/s <here it died, after over an hour dead, I killed it completely>

Git cannot operate robustly with larger repos, it appears to me, on internet connections with even slightly flaky links.

I've googled for a tar-ball of the git repo for opentaps, but found nothing.

What can I do to work around my flaky link?

How hard would it be to add a wget-like mode to git, for the initial repo download?

TIA Zen