and several mirrors. You can obtain a list of the current CTAN mirrors as
ftp://ctan.tug.org/tex-archive/CTAN.sites
Many of the servers (and at least the backbones in Germany and the UK) support compression on the fly, i.e. you can download the contents of a directory and all its subdirectories as a .zip of tar.gz file. Simply add the suffix .zip of .tar.gz to the URL of the directory to download.
There is also a searchable index for CTAN at
http://ctan.tug.org/cgi-bin/ctan-web-search
and
http://www.dante.de/cgi-bin/ctan-index