That's pretty weak defense of AT&T. They have 250,000+ employees. They spent half a billion dollors in alternative fuel vehicles investments in 2011 alone. They have 20B of total capital investment a year. Blue sky projects such as Loon typically takes couple of dozen employees and may be few million dollars to kick off - small enough to be rounding errors in AT&T's budgets. If I have to imagine, the reason AT&T doesn't do this is probably because (1) their leadership has lost habits of innovative/creative envisioning (2) their leadership probably laughed this off because potential for revenue from people in Sahara was not very tempting (3) Their middle management is not empowered or willing enough to paddle such ideas to top in the first place (4) They simply doesn't have setup where bottom-up vision is possible anymore so unless leadership envisions it and executes, it doesn't get done.

The lack of money and employees is probably the last thing that would prevent AT&T to do these kind of projects.