"Analysis now shows the test was a success and sent data to the ground at 1.25 gigabits per second. That is thousands of times the capacity of a home broadband internet connection and the first time such a link has been tested from the stratosphere."
Still all very experimental, and a bit misleading as well. With most residential broadband now in the 1.5-3.0 mbit range, it is at best 'hundreds' of times faster, not thousands... Plus a major catch is that the bandwidth of such a floating platform is shared among -all- of the people uplinking to it, making the realistic throughput rates significantly lower, especially if such a system becomes popular. While there are bottlenecks with wired services as well, they appear much later in the chain and can much easier be worked around than with a wireless service where you are limited by the size of the wireless spectrum itself.
Also, something else to put this 'breakthrough' a little bit more in perspective:
http://www.convergedigest.com/Bandwidth/newnetworksarticle.asp?ID=14545
"Hong Kong Broadband Network (HKBN) officially launched its 1 Gbps symmetric service for the residential market. Approximately 800,000 households, out of a total of 2.2 million households in Hong Kong, are wired to receive the service."
(Typical broadband speeds and availability in South-East Asia and western Europe are currently greater than in North America -- the US now ranks #16 worldwide when it compes to the percentage of its population that has broadband internet, and typical available speeds are lower)