People from the US will be surprised how far the rest of the western world, and high tech eastern Asia, are ahead of the states in terms of recycling and infrastructure.
Japan’s current fiber-optic commercial internet connections use optical fiber transmission windows known as L and C multi-core fiber (MCF) bands to transport data long distances at record speeds. Meanwhile we (USA) have fiber back to copper and Cat3 for the last few hundred feet in most cities at best making the entire idea into a bottle neck.
Cat 3 is a thing and is basically unshielded twisted pair. You can abuse it quite a bit from its voice grade days to cram a few hundred megabits of VDSL over it if it’s only from your house to the curb.
It’s kind of a relic of the past now since everyone uses a streaming service of some kind now but right at the end of physical media’s lifespan, Japan had some key advantages over the US specifically because it was legal to rent albums and I believe individual songs, just like a Blockbuster. Eventually they had the music purchasing equivalent of Redbox in the form of kiosks as well with the advent of recordable Net-MD minidiscs, which only really ever saw success in Japan.
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