We've seen in our work, that under high RTT, high packet loss rate (you can simulate similar effect by using things like dummynet, but it wont' be exactly what you'd expect on cellular network due to reasons mentioned in ATT lab's paper), SPDY results in performance degradation over raw HTTP. Also, I'm not saying 'independent' connections can mitigate against packet loss, it can't, and for the case you mentioned, definitely we'd get a performance hit (either first paint or pageload). It's just SPDY makes it worse than the default HTTP behavior, and that's understandable because it only uses single connection, and single connection suffers from different sorts of problem, and you seem to agree this from your first comment.