Battered by earthquakes and the potential for conflict with China, Taiwan’s leaders want to accelerate plans to make the island more resilient to communications disruptions and direct attacks on its digital infrastructure.
It can be an impossible task.
Audrey Tang, who heads Taiwan’s digital affairs ministry, has said she wants the island’s $740 billion economy to be able to handle a possible collapse of all communications in the event of an emergency by the end of next year.
The threat is not theoretical. Taiwan’s Matsu Islands were digitally disrupted after two internet cables on their submarines were cut by Chinese-flagged vessels in February. Before that, a 2006 earthquake severed eight undersea cables around Taiwan, took weeks to repair, and disrupted internet, banking and cross-border trade in much of Asia. Both events were stark reminders of what can happen in a conflict or natural disaster.
“The main lesson we learned is psychological,” Tang said in a May 17 interview. “How to manage the expectation of reduced bandwidth, how to prioritize bandwidth usage, which usage is good for slightly higher latency, etc.”
Tang said the worst-case scenario for Taiwan would be the destruction of the island’s physical points of communication – the three main telecommunications providers – as well as their power supply.
“The enemy knows” where key facilities on the island are because the information is public, Tang said. “So we can assume that they would be disrupted, jammed or destroyed in a massive earthquake.”
The Tang mentions “earthquakes” a lot. In addition to dealing with natural disasters, Taiwan is located in a tectonically active region known as the “Ring of Fire,” a euphemism for incidents involving tensions with China, including cyberattacks.
“It’s a very apt analogy because an earthquake won’t give you much warning,” Tang, 42, said.
China views Taiwan as part of its territory and vows to one day take control of it, by force if necessary. President Tsai Ing-wen’s government rejects Beijing’s claim, saying the island is already a de facto independent state. And with Taiwan holding presidential elections in early 2024, China is expected to step up efforts to influence the vote.
But Tang’s creation of digital resilience by the end of 2024 is a challenging goal.
The island’s disaster response plan calls for 700 satellite receivers to be deployed across Taiwan. Some of the receivers must be fixed, others mobile, and they must be configured to receive communications from multiple constellations of low Earth orbit and medium Earth orbit satellites.
To get there, the government has opened applications for research institutes to participate in the proof-of-concept testing and verification phase. At least three have signed up so far, Tang said. The winner will start working with satellite providers. Among the providers, the Franco-Luxembourg company SES Global now has two receivers in Taiwan.
Tang said OneWeb, a satellite provider with investors including the U.K. government, Indian conglomerate Bharti Global and Softbank Group Corp., has signaled interest, as has Project Kuiper, an initiative by Amazon.com Inc. to create more than 3000 LEO constellations. satellites. But none of them are currently available.
Only Starlink Inc.’s SpaceX satellite constellation has a live stream at this time. Tang describes Starlink as a potential supplier, but adds that he is looking at more than one participant to “ensure that when disaster strikes, multiple constellations have to be destroyed or disrupted to cut us off from communication with the outside world.”
That means for now, Taiwan’s satellite power pales in comparison to the coverage it currently gets from its 14 undersea cables, said Kenny Huang, president and CEO of the Taiwan Network Information Center, a nonprofit that is partly owned by the Taiwanese government. :
Current satellite power “adds only about 0.01% of the transmission capacity of submarine cables,” Huang said.
However, submarine cables are highly vulnerable. Huang added that the plan to have 700 receivers would not be large enough to meet the communication needs of the island’s 23 million people.
Tang called the 700 receivers he initially sought to minimize to maintain basic communications. The government has earmarked $18 million in 2023-2024 to subsidize disaster response program testing and verification.
He added that the self-governing island has learned lessons from the conflict in Ukraine, which has faced repeated cyber attacks on its infrastructure and population by Russia. But Ukraine has access to the Starlink system, which has helped maintain communications since the war began.
It is not clear whether this is a realistic option for Taiwan. There are questions about whether SpaceX owner Elon Musk, whose Tesla Inc. has significant investments in China, would want the geopolitical headache of helping Taiwan. Musk suggested in comments to the Financial Times last year that Taiwan should agree to become a special administrative region of China, angering Taiwanese officials and drawing praise from Beijing.
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