Something Trevor said made me think of this:
Host 2: (nc -l 10001 | pv -c -N one >/dev/null & nc -l 10002 | pv -c -N two
/dev/null & nc -l 10003 | pv -c -N three >/dev/null & nc -l 10004 | pv
-c -N four >/dev/null)
Host 1: ( pv -c -N one </dev/zero | nc host2 10001 & pv -c -N two </dev/zero | nc host2 10002 & pv -c -N three </dev/zero | nc host2 10003 & pv -c -N four </dev/zero | nc host2 10004 )
As long as all the pv instances have the same controlling tty and process group, which is accomplished by putting the whole thing inside parentheses ( "(",")" ) the IPC stuff works correctly. It's designed for parts of a single pipeline yes, but this trick appears to fool pv adequately well. At least on Linux and OpenBSD this works, not sure about Solaris.
-Adam