Google parent Alphabet has killed off its much-hyped Project Loon after almost eight years. This introduced a means of delivering Internet access to remote and underserved areas using large steerable balloons in the stratosphere. These were designed to provide wider coverage than terrestrial base stations, in order to reach remote locations, but with far lower cost and complexity than a satellite solution. However, it seems that balloon (or stratellite) solutions are being squeezed between low cost approaches to rural cellular build-out, such as Facebook’s OpenCellular, and the increasingly affordable and deployable low earth orbit (LEO) satellites. And while the sky is becoming littered with LEOs, the balloons did not achieve the scale needed to support strong business models for Google…