From the point of view of somebody who works in residential last mile internet service loon was always a pipe dream, because you'd need a truly absurd number of

From the point of view of somebody who works in residential last mile internet service loon was always a pipe dream, because you'd need a truly absurd number of them to provide persistent packet-loss-free 24x7x365 coverage over a USA county sized area. Paying customers won't tolerate situations like "oh sorry the balloon has drifted away with the upper atmosphere winds, wait a few hours for maybe another one to be back in our region". With various ground based data relays for aggregating traffic coming from the PtMP balloon-to-cpe radio links. With advances in 600/700 MHz (and 2500 MHz band) based 3GPP rev-whatever tech for LTE-based last mile that can punch through trees, and starlink (and hopefully someday some viable non-spacex competitors for starlink), and other terrestrial WISP stuff, the need for something like loon is greatly decreased.