Taiwan relies on 14 undersea cables to connect it with the world but with more than a dozen incidents of cables being damaged last year, is the country's connectivity too vulnerable?
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00:00A report from Taiwan's National Audit Office shows that Taiwan is struggling to protect
00:05its undersea internet cables.
00:07This is a map of all of Taiwan's active undersea internet cables that it uses to connect with
00:12the outside world.
00:14This report shows that a total of 12 cables failed last year were damaged, the most in
00:20five years.
00:21This report is revealing that a lot of the times it's foreign fishing vessels that will
00:25sail in the Taiwan Strait and will sometimes drag their anchor or their net to catch fish,
00:30and when they do that, they also damage the cable that's lying on the seafloor.
00:34Now, Taiwan's submarine cables are very important for the country to connect with the outside
00:39world.
00:40Taiwan only has about 14 cables.
00:42And analysts say that it's not just about keeping Taiwan connected, but Taiwan in general
00:47serves as a hub to link other countries in the Asia-Pacific region with the rest of the
00:51world.
00:52Now, going back to this report, there's a lot of evidence that Taiwan's submarine cables
00:59are very important for the rest of the world to connect with the outside world, but it's
01:06not just about keeping Taiwan connected, it's also very important for the rest of the world
01:11to connect with the rest of the world.
01:14So, I think it's very important for the rest of the world to connect with the outside world.
01:21Now, going back to this report, the National Audit Office has identified two cables that
01:26just keep on getting damaged.
01:28The first one is cable number two, which connects New Taipei City, one of Taiwan's largest cities,
01:34to the outlying islands of Matsu, Dongyin Island to be exact.
01:38Now, this cable is suspected of being damaged by a foreign fishing vessel on the 2nd of
01:43February.
01:44The second cable that keeps on getting damaged is cable number three.
01:48Now, this one connects Taoyuan City, which has Taiwan's largest international airport,
01:53again to the outlying islands of Matsu, this island now being Nangan.
01:57Now, this incident is apparently the cable was damaged by a cargo ship passing through,
02:03but what's interesting about this scenario is that that incident ended up knocking out
02:07power and internet connectivity for 10,000 homes in that area, so Taiwan had to struggle
02:14with getting that connection back up in a short amount of time.
02:17Now, the question is now what Taiwan can do to protect these internet cables and if it
02:22can maybe switch to an alternative like satellites.
02:24Well, to see if that's possible, I spoke to Alan Liska, he's a threat intelligence analyst
02:29based in Virginia.
02:30You know, cables are really important and you're never going to be able to get the kind
02:36of bandwidth and connectivity that you get through these cables over satellite, but you
02:40have to have something, right?
02:42You have to have that backup and satellite is the best alternative to that.
02:47I mean, we can't really go back to telegraph and Morse code, so really your choices for
02:53high speed networks are cable and satellite, so there should be a lot more investment in
02:59satellite overall.
03:00Now, Alan, this report shows that it's actually fishing vessels that are sometimes scraping
03:05the bottom of the ocean floor when they're fishing or anchoring and damaging these cables.
03:10Given that, should Taiwan be working with other countries and advocating to better protect
03:14this kind of infrastructure?
03:17So it's actually, there are specialty companies that do that, that keep subs in the water
03:23kind of all the time, prepared to do these cables because cables break all the time.
03:26And again, it's not always nefarious, weather can do it.
03:30You mentioned the fishermen who hit it.
03:33So they can be repaired and they can be repaired surprisingly quickly.
03:38We've gotten very good at figuring out where that is.
03:42The problem is when it starts mounting like this, when there are 14 breaks over a relatively
03:47short time period, even with the preparedness that we have in place, it is really hard to
03:52keep up with all of those.
03:54You've seen, there've been governmental reports from Taiwan, from Singapore, from the UK very
04:01much emphasizing how much more attention needs to be paid to how we're protecting our cables.
04:07And I think that's going to be a bigger problem going forward.
04:09And of course, as global conflict escalates, suddenly these cables become a much bigger
04:15and more important target.
04:16And so they have to be protected.