Determining how to close the urban/rural digital divide has confounded the communications industry ever since its inception, with the way lined with corpses of failures, of which Google’s Project Loon is one of the most recent. But new efforts keep emerging and many, in recent years, have centered on High Altitude Platforms (HAPs), which can be regarded as hybrids between balloons and aircraft, launched into the stratosphere at heights between 20 and 50 kilometers (12-30 miles), drawing small amounts of power from solar cells to maintain a fixed position. A significant development is that HAPs are starting to deliver cellular services, either 4G or 5G, as in a Swiss HAP recently tested for covering rural and tribal areas at speeds…