Hi Juho, I'm the guy who did this study at Google. I agree with your criticisms that the measurement setup does not reflect real network conditions in all case

Hi Juho, I'm the guy who did this study at Google. I agree with your criticisms that the measurement setup does not reflect real network conditions in all cases. However, we have done a tremendous amount of measurement on real mobile networks as well, and settled on this approach after a lot of iterating and tuning to come up with what (we believe to be) a fairly realistic setup that - most importantly - achieves repeatable results. This was a deliberate tradeoff. We have measured mobile networks all over the world and observe that the network variation across space and time is incredibly high. It's pretty much meaningless to talk about "real mobile network conditions", since the conditions you measure in an office in Seattle are so vastly different than what you get on a train in Finland or a highrise in New York. The simple throttling we did does, in fact, accurately reflect HTTP and SPDY load times for those specific network conditions, which were meant to be representative of major carriers in the US. You're right that we did not account for network latency to the origin server, but I would not expect that to skew the results in favor of either protocol, since the last mile is the slow link in this case. The DNS overhead was an artifact of the test setup, but HTTP and SPDY should have the same number of required DNS lookups in both cases. Feel free to drop me a line (my contact info is on the original article)!