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Aside from the fact that I would consider that pretty impressive, it's not at all what they're doing. They're using lasers between the satellites to get the data back to/from the ground.

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An alternative approach would be to relay the signal on the surface, perhaps using a fleet of aquatic animals with the same communication system mounted on them.

You know, sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads.

You could imagine floating ground stations to bounce it between sats, but that would be huge amount capital to cover all the oceans.

That, of course, requires that they have lasers on all the necessary satellites, a hard hardware problem.

They've got something like 1200 laser equipped satellites in orbit already with 800 of them already operational (the others aren't in final orbits yet I believe). That's about 45% of all the Starlink satellites in orbit. So I would say it's a solved hardware problem.

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