To you and @nxzero, I'm not debating whether it's better or worse, I'm trying to find out if I'm actually understanding it right. From some of the other comments, it appears that it is just a matter of them sending you a physical disk -- it makes sense now.

it's 428 days to ship 50TB of stuff on a 10Mb/s pipe. 5 days if you have 1Gb/s

This assumes you get perfect utilisation of the connection (which never happens) so i would probably round up to 450 to 500 days on a 10Mb/s pipe