Officials hope to provide backup satellite coverage for the whole country by the end of the year.
Officials hope to provide backup satellite coverage for the whole country by the end of the year.
T aiwan is working with increased urgency to set up a backup satellite network after a possible Chinese sabotage incident earlier this year, a top official from the island country told National Review this week.
Officials initially announced the plan last year, saying it will involve 700 satellite-transmission sites, across Taiwan and a few international locations, with which the country could maintain contact with the world in the event of a natural disaster — or a future Chinese attack.
“There’s much more visibility and urgency this year,” said Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s digital minister, citing incidents in which subsea internet cables connecting the main island of Taiwan to the outerlying Matsu Islands were cut in February, leaving the distant island group with less-reliable communication alternatives for 50 days until their repair.
Echoing the Taiwanese government’s line, Tang stopped short of directly accusing Beijing of carrying out a sabotage operation but said, “There’s two subsea cables, and within one week, two PRC-flag-flying vessels, one fishing, one cargo, accidentally dropped anchor and kept moving.”
Tang sat for an interview in New York on Tuesday, while visiting for meetings on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly. The first person to hold the role of digital minister, Tang has used the post to focus on the satellite project, international artificial-intelligence standards, and combating Chinese Communist Party disinformation, especially ahead of the country’s presidential election in January. Tang told NR that the meetings in New York have yielded Taiwan likely partnerships with Meta and Google on testing and verification programs that would root out disinformation produced by artificial intelligence.
The Taiwanese official’s comments about the new urgency of the satellite plan came against a worrying backdrop: a spike in Chinese military activity this month that included an aircraft carrier’s participation in massive drills in the Pacific and the passage of a record-breaking number of People’s Liberation Army jets into Taiwan’s air-defense-identification zone. Taiwanese defense minister Chiu Kuo-cheng reportedly called the situation “quite abnormal” today. Meanwhile, in a prerecorded video, the country’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, told attendees of a conference in New York that China is exerting “maximum pressure” on the island.
In pursuing a backup satellite link, Taipei has taken a cue from Ukraine, which has used terminals from Starlink, the satellite provider founded by Elon Musk, to great effect as Russia has tried to disable critical infrastructure in the country. But Musk’s handling of his contribution to Ukraine’s war effort has led to some controversy, as Musk reportedly intervened to limit Ukraine’s access to Starlink after he learned that Ukrainian forces planned an attack on Crimea — which he viewed as too escalatory.
That, and recent comments by Musk that seemed to propagate a pro-Beijing line about Taiwan, have led to skepticism about the billionaire. On Twitter, the Taiwanese foreign minister recently rebuked him for those remarks.
Earlier this year, Taiwan inked contracts with the U.K. satellite-network provider One Web for low earth orbit and with Luxembourg’s SES for middle earth orbit. “The hope is that we work with as many as possible satellite vendors, so that by the end of next year, we’ll have more than 700 either mobile or fixed satellite receiving points, and each point, either a hotspot or a backhaul, connects hopefully to two or more satellite systems,” Tang said.
But Tang said that Taiwan isn’t “ruling anything out,” when asked about the possibility of Starlink as an additional partner. “We do see” that being “overly reliant on one satellite provider — in particular the one that you mentioned — may not be the preference for many Taiwanese people and MPs,” Tang said, adding that the digital-affairs ministry is “investing in a plurality of satellite providers, not just for redundancy’s sake” but also because “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.”
Tang added that the project is starting with the remote islands and said that officials expect that OneWeb will cover most of the rest of the country by the end of the year.