This is an excellent presentation of the issues around performance of the mobile web including the overhead of cell towers, tools for measuring timing, etc.
Breaking the 1000ms Time to Glass Mobile Barrier (Ilya Grigorik)
http://marakana.com/s/post/1423/breaking_the_1000ms_time_to_glass_mobile_barrier_ilya_grigorik_video
High Performance Browser Networking (O'Reilly)
http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/books/1230000000545
W3C Navigation Timing
https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/webperf/raw-file/tip/specs/NavigationTiming/Overview.html