American defence and energy corporation, General Atomics, has successfully tested a prototype for in-flight laser communications with Canadian-based, Kepler Communications, as per New Atlas. Together they managed to transmit data at up to 1 Gbps between a De Havilland Canada DHC-6 Twin Otter aircraft and a satellite in low-Earth orbit, showing serious potential for future high-speed communication where traditional radio-based transmission may be inadequate or non-viable.
Optical data transmission is the backbone of modern fiber networks, but that uses wires to transmit the information. Doing so over the air is far more complex, though we've seen great advances in recent years in terrestrial, above-ground laser transmission technologies like Google's Taara project. There's also NASA's Deep Space Optical Communications system that can function across 10s of millions of miles in deep space.
