[dermesser]

It's not peanuts at all, given that it's an entirely different technology. Free space optics will have different applications, of course, but those applications where fiber is currently not feasible stand to profit quite a bit from this.

[Beached]

I can think of all of rural America underserved with fast internet, forced to share puny fiber runs to towers retransmitting over low speed radio.

implementing the same infra, but using lasers as the backbone could speed up a large area of the country, make rolling out dense radio networks like 5g way faster and cheaper, etc.