Comment by Tuna-Fish

There are some wavelengths that maintain decent signal quality through cloud cover, and even rainstorms. I cannot find the paper right now, but iirc Tightbeam (formerly from the Google sharks with lasers team, now spun out as Aalyria), demonstrated space to ground comms in adverse weather with negligible packet loss and something like 40% reduced bandwidth.

The customer terminals will likely never connect through lasers (because a laser can only point in one direction at a time), but moving the ground station uplink to a laser link sounds very beneficial.