Is this accurate enough for your purposes?

#! perl -slw
use strict;
use Time::HiRes qw[ time ];
use IO::Socket::INET;

my $s = IO::Socket::INET->new( 'www.bbc.co.uk:80' ) or die "$!, $^E";
my $start = time;
print {$s} 'GET //realmedia/fmg2.ram HTTP/1.0', "\n";
my $read;
read( $s, $read, 15 );

printf "First 15 bytes ('$read') took %.3f seconds\n", time() - $start
+;
__END__
C:\test>junk5
First 15 bytes ('HTTP/1.1 200 OK') took 0.402 seconds

C:\test>junk5
First 15 bytes ('HTTP/1.1 200 OK') took 0.572 seconds
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