For instance in Australia, I’ll have to register with the ACMA (our FCC) and they require information about what kind of radio your using, where your ground stations are, and it actually creates a bit of a catch 22 here in Australia for non-experts. You need the ACMA documents to get the launch permits to get orbit information to get coordinated with Amazon Ground Station to get documents about your ground stations for the ACMA.

It’s definitely resolvable but it’s non-trivial and requires dealing with people who are familiar with the intricacies of a specific government bureaucracy. There’s no equivalent of “a Wi-Fi module” for space and despite the massive improvement in electronic systems that can survive in space for a while, you’re going to run into a brick wall of red tape the moment you want to communicate with your space craft due to how complicated the regulatory environment is in space for small operators. A great example is the fees involved, for a first time applicant it’s AU$135,000 to file the paperwork (plus extra if it’s not perfect and they have to work with you to actually get it accepted) to use a radio in space, that’s $135000 to say “I’m going to use standard s band communications at x number of watts power using a global commercial provider like Amazon and have nothing custom at all” and it’s sufficiently uncommon that there’s not even a form to fill in so you end up having to talk to people they recommend as consultants just to find out how to format the documents you’re sending them.

All of this is complicated gone for laser communication systems. If you have a ground station with appropriate airspace clearance (cause firing lasers into airplane cockpits is bad) which is actually pretty easy to coordinate as the air traffic regulations are used to putting in place all sort of “don’t go here during x/y hours” type notices and it’s not a big deal to them why… all the paperwork is done at that point other than your launch permits. No radio regulation, no ACMA rip off fees, no hassle at all. It’s just very difficult to get laser communication equipment at the moment as it’s still the bleeding edge. It’s rapidly growing as commercial providers bring things to market but it’s still getting through the chicken-or-egg phase of you don’t have demand for ground stations without satellites and satellites can’t use them without ground stations. But it’s slowly improving.

However for a long time cost will be prohibitive for laser comma. Despite the elimination of all the fees and bureaucracy it’s still much cheaper to develop your small satellite with off the shelf Software defined radio hardware which can cost significantly less money during development and prototyping phases because the cost of commercial “off the shelf” parts for space hardware is insane.

I’m looking forward to SpaceX getting starship flying because it’s going to utterly destroy this state of affairs by sheer market forces. The first year of starship flying commercial payloads once a week, will be able to put more hardware into orbit than we have in the entire history up to this point, including falcon 9 and the copious launches of Starlink satellites. When it costs more to file the paperwork than it does to build and launch your entire cubesat, ($100000 is very generous budget for a 3-6 month cubesat if SpaceX live up to their projected costs per kilogram to orbit… minus regulation costs) your going to see people push for the necessary regulatory changes to get us an equivalent to “Wi-Fi” but in space, an anyone can use this under x watts frequency allocation that will just open the floodgates to innovative small satellite designs and projects.