Let me explain.
First of all \'Recieving world\' has nothing to do with your internet connection right now. Indeed, it does use compression on the world file, which is 12MB. On anything greater than a 400mhz, this should only take 2-4 minutes. There is then an approximate wait of 2-10 minutes, depending on how full the server is, to recieve the \'actor list\' (as described by the debugging output of psclient) after the world is loaded. At this point, the screen finally refreshes and you are in the game.
The world file is compressed to save disk space.. if you want to make things faster, uncompress the file, as the VFS provided by crystal space can also \'mount\' these without being zipped.