Downloading it from steam takes just as mush time.
But that 50GB is probably for more then 100 hours of playtime, which amounts to a persistent 145kb/s. With some caching up front, I think this could actually work. There literally is no need to have everything on disk before starting. Maybe a few hundred megs before starting, but even that is less then a few minutes on most connections, which is a lot faster then downloading the full game before starting.