Fetching 50k rows over a slow connection is bound to be slow, no matter what you do. I just tried this - pulling 50k rows from a pretty fast server (4 way Xeon, relatively lightly loaded) over my DSL line that achieves approximately 80KB/second, and just grabbing the data (with a pure C program) and a SQL query that just fetches the first rows (no WHERE clause, no ORDER BY) takes almost two minutes.

In this case I think your major issue is the amount of data that you have to pull over the slow connection - I'd try to find ways to reduce that - maybe some client-side caching if the same data can be re-used, or a better/more specific WHERE clause to avoid fetching data that is not relevant.

Michael