The capacity of these systems seems really tiny by modern standards as well as highly power inefficient. The fastest link demonstrated was around 5Gb/s at ~160

The capacity of these systems seems really tiny by modern standards as well as highly power inefficient. The fastest link demonstrated was around 5Gb/s at ~160W. This is about 3 orders of magnitude worse from an energy per bit perspective than fiber based systems. From that point alone, it’s hard to imagine these systems being cost competitive with existing fiber infrastructure. From a system capacity perspective these systems are about 500x less capacity. On page 26, it seems the primary application is being able to get more data down to Earth for remote sensing applications. The most important application of lasercom from LEO is direct-to-ground downlinks since the main point is being able to download to Earth the increasing amount of data that remote-sensing missions require