Some of their use-case they are crowing about on their site cover temporary things: back haul for major-but-temporary events, tethered-drone-mounted units for emergency disaster recover where a cell site is taken out etc. Those are the sorts of things where laying fibre 20km for use for just a day or two just isn't going to happen, but a temporary laser link that you can get up and running in a hour or two would be great.
What kind of data rates and distances are they talking about that isn't served by existing products? For example, you can buy a 20km range, 2Gbps wireless point to point link for a flat $3000 today: https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/wireless-airfiber-ptp/pr...
What they mention in the article is up to 20Gbps, but they'd have to be pretty dang cheap to out compete just buying 10 of the existing options.
The issue is that you can't put 10 of your 2 Gbps wireless links next to each other. You quite possibly end up with < 2 Gbps as interference kills your signals (unless you put the transceivers so far apart from one another that you sort of defeat the purpose). That said there are other wireless solutions that can get you > 10 Gbps over > 20 km already (not sure about 20 Gbps, but I wouldn't be surprised). The issue is available spectrum, i.e. you can't just setup the link, because the spectrum doesn't belong to you. Not a problem for optics.
