They don't need any new development or that kind of stuff for wide coverage, just the intersatellite links, and they have launched 15 groups of them in the first 6 months of this year.
Iridium launched with inter-satellite links in 1997.
Swapping radios out for lasers isn't that much harder, there is some difficulty in tracking/alignment but it's space - things tend to stay where you put them, with whatever momentum you left them with.
Completely different ballgame to Autopilot which basically requires advancing the field of AI by another quantum leap before it's ready.
They've launched satellites that have lasers, but I don't think they've actually demonstrated they have the ability to aim those lasers precisely enough to actually communicate between satellites in orbit.
This statement is meaningless as written. You can emit as much or as little with a laser as you like. You could say "a lot of power is required for a reliable inter-satellite optical link", to which I would say "citation needed".
Iridium has been doing inter-satellite links since the late 90s and moving from RF to optical doesn't change the game that much.
The data rate has very little to do with the complexity of the satellite-to-satellite links, and steering RF and optics isn't as different as you might think.
that's partially true. the data rates have a lot to do with frequency reuse, which means more complicated designs. starlink is complicated in the dynamic conditions, but the beamforming is relatively simple.