NASA says "photonics dawning as the communications light"

One major NASA priority is to use lasers to make space communications for both near-Earth and deep-space missions more efficient. NASA's communications systems have matured over the decades, but they still use the same radio-frequency (RF) system developed in the earliest days of the agency. After more than 50 years of using solely RF, NASA is investing in new ways to increase data rates while also finding more efficient communications systems. Photonics may provide the solution. Several centers across NASA are experimenting with laser communications, which has the potential to provide data rates at least 10 to 100 times better than RF. These higher speeds would support increasingly sophisticated instruments and the transmission of live video from anywhere in the solar system.

Laser Focus World's take: Laser-based space communications are already the norm as far as we're concerned, and we've been writing about it for decades. Here is a sampling of informative editorial on the subject:
-- Free-space communications
-- Laser space instrumentation
-- Earth to Moon and even Mars communication