I need to deploy vSphere Server Appliance 5.1. I have vSphere Client running locally and my internet upload is capped at 3 Mbps. It says it's going to take about 200 minutes to upload.

When selecting a URL as opposed to a local file, does vSphere Client download it locally and then upload, or does it download the OVA directly to the server?

My goal is to avoid waiting 3 1/2 hours for this to upload.

If specifying a URL isn't any faster, are there any other methods that would allow me to deploy from the datacenter instead of my office?

We don't have any Windows VM's installed on our cluster. So unfortunately I don't have a Windows machine with faster upload speed.