Modulating a laser beam for communications is not new but this distance effort by amateurs doing a two-way voice transmission over 167km in New Zeland is pretty cool. This article also mentions a number of other laser communication long distance efforts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Laser_Ranging_experiment...
Not quite there yet at the amateur level, private industry soon, but then there is the question of safety to air traffic.
Can you imagine the first moon data link? JWST has 8mbps