Re: demonstrated broadband speeds of 400Mbps
Yonge Street is 1896 km (1178 miles), extending from the shores of Lake Ontario in Toronto, to Rainy River at the Ontario/Minnesota border. Farther than the distance from Berlin to Moscow.
Until the 1960s and maybe even into the 1970s, street addresses of houses in towns in western Ontario could run to 5 or 6 digits. In the mid-1960s our address only 25 mi. north of Toronto changed from a 5 digit number to "400 Yonge St.", as every town was given permission to index from zero at the town boundary.
Parts of Yonge St. between towns were named "Highway 11" on maps in the 1970s as a highway nomenclature was introduced, and in small towns it is not uncommon for sections of it to have been renamed (the most common options being Main, King or Queen St. - politicians aren't especially imaginative) but it remains Yonge Street nonetheless.
We can't thank the Romans, but can credit the British: the first section of the road (to Lake Simcoe, where water links enabled canoe travel to Georgian Bay on Lake Huron) was surveyed & launched by John Graves Simcoe, the first Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada (now Ontario) in 1793 (co-incident with the founding of the city of York, now Toronto). The road as surveyed is claimed to have followed native trails, but in fact runs pretty much dead straight (like many Roman roads), conforming to surveyed grids overlaid on maps of the time.
Much of the early road was built as corderoy (logs, laid side by side in the mud - you can imagine how hard this was on wagons & horses of the day) by homesteaders, as a condition of their receiving free land title. They received title to a section of land 1.25 mi. on a side - the distance between surveyed concession lines (major roads, now) on condition that they built a house & outbuildings (barn, shed), cleared a portion of the forest to farm, and cleared the road allowance up the side of the property, within one year. Doing this with horse or oxen on your own or with minimal assistance was a super-human effort. Ontario was heavily wooded with virgin forest (massive trees, long since logged) on glacial till plains & moraines: the soil was full of rocks & glacial "erratics" (boulders left by receding glaciers), lakes, rivers & swamps.
Tolls were soon imposed by farm owners who had to build & maintain their section of the road; this became a significant impediment to trade within the province. The government had to pass an edict banning the imposition of tolls, and maintenance was eventually assumed by local townships in the 1800s, and the province in the 1900s.
While we thank the British not the Romans for our first major transportation foray north, it is worth noting that when completed to Lake Simcoe in 1796, Yonge Street was named after the British Secretary for War Sir George Yonge... an expert on Roman roads.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
