Not able to initiate replications

I have a problem with initiating merge replication over slow VPN. It is fairly big - 11GB. Every time i try to initiate DB, i get some sort of error (losing connection or not enough memory for example) and whole process needs to be restarted. I have other smaller DBs that are replicating fine. Is there any way of helping replication for example by copying snapshot over FTP?Thanks,Pete