TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — Taiwan is racing to complete a backup satellite network to ensure stable communications in the event of a natural disaster or Chinese invasion, Taiwan’s Digital Minister Audrey Tang (唐鳳) said in a recent interview with National Review.
“There’s much more visibility and urgency this year,” Tang said. The network consists of 700 satellite transmission sites nationwide and includes several locations abroad, which government officials hope will be near completion by the end of the year.
Taiwan has inked a contract with the U.K. satellite-network provider One Web to help with the project.
This ambitious endeavor was prompted by multiple incidents in which undersea cables connecting the main island of Taiwan to Matsu were severed in February. The Taiwan government has blamed two Chinese ships for cutting the cables.
Matsu residents were forced to hook up to a limited internet via microwave radio transmission.
Tang, who held sideline meetings at the U.N. General Assembly, said she has established likely partnerships with Meta and Google to help combat disinformation.
One lesson Taipei has learned from Ukraine is its overreliance on Starlink, the satellite provider founded by Elon Musk. While it has been effective in maintaining steady communications, Musk reportedly limited Ukraine’s access to Starlink after he learned that Kyiv intended to carry out an attack on Crimea — which he believed would exacerbate the conflict.
Nevertheless, Tang said Starlink could still be a potential partner but Taiwan knows being “overly reliant on one satellite provider … may not be the preference for many Taiwanese people and MPs.”
The Ministry of Digital Affairs is “investing in a plurality of satellite providers, not just for redundancy’s sake," Tang said. "We want to work with many jurisdictions, many countries’ systems so that it becomes, as I mentioned, very difficult to jam or disrupt all those different satellite systems belonging to different countries at once,” she added.
