I like the ETH result and it is an impressive feat (I know some people involved in that work). That said the article is a lot of rubbish. First there is the weird focus on lasers, all (relevant) Optical Communication uses lasers, including fibre comms. Then they make it sound like this is to replace fibre, again rubbish.
The amount of data going through fibres is absolutely staggering, replacing this with intersatellite links is just not going to happen. First you still need fibre to connect your ground stations (and you need quite a bit of redundancy due to weather) and there are still a lot of unsolved problems (tracking and pointing for example). However there are many interesting applications of optical satellite links and quite a few players are investing in it, the big one is actually data connections for scientific space missions.
The amount of data going through fibres is absolutely staggering, replacing this with intersatellite links is just not going to happen. First you still need fibre to connect your ground stations (and you need quite a bit of redundancy due to weather) and there are still a lot of unsolved problems (tracking and pointing for example). However there are many interesting applications of optical satellite links and quite a few players are investing in it, the big one is actually data connections for scientific space missions.