Rti Coverage: Digital Resilience Forum — Subsea Cables, Traffic, and Response Strategies
Thank you to Rti for its detailed coverage of our event! Here are the key points:
Internet Access May Fail Even If Not All Subsea Cables Are Severed
Even if only half of the subsea cables are severed and Taiwan is not completely cut off from the world, collapse caused by congestion could bring the fundamental functions that keep the internet running to a halt. For users in practice, the experience could be just like a total outage.
Routing Traffic Overseas Is “Less Efficient and Riskier” but More Profitable
Internet service providers can manage traffic by allowing more important content to take priority over certain uses. CHENG PENG emphasized that in a crisis, ISPs can choose “whom to save.” This also highlights how ISPs ordinarily have the power to decide to “route your traffic overseas and then back again, rather than peer locally.”
There Are Multiple Ways to Respond to Subsea Cable Outages
Hsin-I Chen said that people previously viewed subsea cables as a commercial issue and only realized in the past two years that “subsea cables are also part of geopolitics.” As Taiwanese society pays more attention to subsea cables, it can strengthen measures to protect their security while also raising the cost to China of taking action against them.
He then offered two recommendations:
- The Ministry of Digital Affairs could publish more real-time data about subsea cables, allowing developers to connect through APIs and learn “where a cable broke,” “why it broke,” and other information, thereby strengthening public awareness and vigilance.
- Taiwan should build more subsea cables, particularly in the “waters off the east coast,” where the sea becomes deep immediately beyond the coast. Compared with the waters off western Taiwan, cables there would be less vulnerable to damage, making the area highly suitable.