Sounds like the people setting the standards in your environment and I are on the same page.

If it's a fast network do not worry about the size of the backup you'll be restoring from a remote location. Think of it this way, whether you copy the file first then restore it from a local location, or restore it over the network, the data has to move from one place to the other. SQL Server is more than capable of managing the data movement over the wire just as well as Windows can.