This test was performed with a single client based in LA, and concluded the fastest font - Open Sans - downloaded in 476ms. The test fails to measure how much o

This test was performed with a single client based in LA, and concluded the fastest font - Open Sans - downloaded in 476ms. The test fails to measure how much of this is setup time vs transfer time, or account for behaviour of TCP during the transfer. You will find, and I will measure this for you if you really want, that setup time absolutely dominates this cost. If setup time is amortized across all assets on a site, as it is when self-hosted, the true cost of the 220KiB font download will be vastly lower -- closer to 100ms assuming a sufficiently warm TCP connection over even an 8Mbit link, and significantly less again with faster links. As for browser-side caching, this is once again wishful thinking and there is no room for it in any kind of engineering discipline