Can SPDY really make the web faster?

HTTP is a successful Internet technology on top of which a lot of the web resides. However, limitations with its current specification have encouraged some to look for the next generation of HTTP. In SPDY, Google has come up with such a proposal that has growing community acceptance, especially after being adopted by the IETF HTTPbis-WG as the basis for HTTP/2.0. SPDY has the potential to greatly improve web experience with little deployment overhead, but we still lack an understanding of its true potential in different environments. This paper offers a comprehensive evaluation of SPDY´s performance using extensive experiments. We identify the impact of network characteristics and website infrastructure on SPDY´s potential page loading benefits, finding that these factors are decisive for an optimal SPDY deployment strategy. Through exploring such key aspects that affect SPDY, and accordingly HTTP/2.0, we feed into the wider debate regarding the impact of future protocols.