The British Council, a not-for-profit organization sponsored by the British government’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office, will be relying in part on satellite technology to help it achieve its mission of educating foreign countries on British culture as well as helping to improve the perception of the United Kingdom in foreign countries and develop stronger ties between the United Kingdom and other countries.

To help in its mission, the council signed an agreement with Loral Skynet and Global Crossing under which the two companies will provide a communications network. About half of the sites being connected in this network will use Loral Skynet’s SkyReach Internet protocol-based services.

“What we have been able to do is help them, in collaboration with Global Crossing (which is the prime relationship here), by supplying the British Council 130 links in a network of 260 sites spanning 110 countries around the globe,” Jon Kirchner, vice president of global marketing at Loral Skynet, told Satellite News. “What we are doing is essentially helping Global Crossing and ultimately helping the customer achieve service levels and experiences as close to or the same as a terrestrial experience for the applications they want to use this for, which include Internet, e-mail access, large file transfer, video distribution and video conferencing. That Internet access is going to feed an Internet café in each one of these British Council locations.”

British Council offices, depending on location, will use space, ground-based resources, or a combination of both, to attain data speeds of up to 2 megabits per second on the forward link and 512 kilobits per second on the return link.

(John McCarthy, Loral Skynet, 212/338-5345)