Someone asked me privately:

Hey, in case you /dev/null Karl: The 5ms at 1200 req/s criteria in RFC2010 refers to the latency of a request from the local network, right? The RFC doesn't make that clear, and in fact would make it sound like it's supposed to be able to do 5ms over wider areas.

RFC2010 did not intend to amend the universal constant "C".