Hi Mark,
The bottleneck is clearly the overseas connection in your case. The server is hosted in a server farm that is directly connected to an internet backbone, so that there should be no relevant limit on the server side. There are currently no mirrors. And you are right - the 'Patches' are indeed full downloads at the moment. There were some technical reasons a couple of years ago that made us switch to this solution (we had small patches before). We will, however, as soon as possible (I don't want to promise anything regarding timing here and now) have a look into it to see whether the problems of back then have been overcome.
It would be good to know if others are facing the same problems.
Best regards,
Peter