Built-in Security
When you send an email to someone, you only intend for the recipient to read it. You don’t really want a load of other people having a look and knowing your secrets. It doesn’t matter whether it is a love letter or a message from a company CEO to employees of an organization, security really matters these days and current RF communication doesn’t offer it. However, laser communication does.
And it offers a level of security that is seeing it used increasingly for future developments in the establishment of impenetrable and impossible to hack networks such as dedicated, private data networks owned by individual organizations.
Size of Beam
Laser communication systems use beams with very small beam divergence which is physically inaccessible to radio frequency technologies. This makes laser communication systems extremely secure because one would have to get into the narrow beam to eavesdrop on a connection. Considering that this beam is actually moving as it is sent – e.g. from drones or balloons moving in high altitude – this is an almost impossible task to pull off. And if that is not enough you can even use Quantum Key Distribution with laser communications to really achieve unhackable links and the most secure connections physically possible.
| Typ. Scenario | Link distance | Laser beam size | Ka-band beam size | X-band beam size |
| Air-to-ground link from UAV | 50 km | 1 m | 1,600 m | 3,200 m |
| Air-to-air link of high-altitude constellation | 200 km | 5 m | 6,500 m | 13,000 m |
| Space-to-ground link of Earth observation mission | 1,400 km | 35 m | 45,000 m | 90,000 m |
| Inter-satellite link of LEO constellation | 4,000 km | 111 m | 145,000 m | 290,000 m |