I see a few questions surrounding this topic, but none of them answer this question specifically. I am working with a client on a high traffic web site (major fashion brand) and there is discussion about web fonts installed locally on our server, vs google web fonts loaded through their service.
While faced with the decision of using the free service offered by the GoogleApi and it's web fonts service, vs purchasing the distribution licenses needed for various protectd fonts (or subscribing to a service which covers this for us) the cost issue is know... Google wins because it is free.
HOWEVER... when faced with the bandwidth/latency issue of loading the fonts from our server vs using the google service I am not certain which would be a better option.
So... Is it true that the google service would have a higher latency as compared to a font served up from our server locally?
I'm sorry I do not have more information on the servers we have set up, but we have numerous servers set up to handle the bandwidth required to maintain the load we receive daily. As I said we are a global fashion retail company.