Provided herein are various improvements to laser communication ranging. In one example, a method includes combining a ranging signal with data communications into an optical transmission for receipt by a communication node, and obtaining an additional optical transmission transferred by the communication node comprising additional data communications combined with a retransmitted version of the ranging signal. The method includes determining an indication of a range to the communication node based at least on a comparison between properties of the ranging signal and properties of the retransmitted version of the ranging signal after separation from the additional data communications.