NANGAN: Last month, bed-and-breakfast owner Chen Yu-Lin had to tell his guests he couldn’t provide them with internet. Others living in Matsue, one of Taiwan’s outlying islands, struggled to pay electricity bills, make doctor’s appointments or receive packages. To connect with the outside world, Matsu’s 14,000 residents rely on two submarine internet cables running to the main island of Taiwan. The National Communications Commission blamed two Chinese ships for cutting cables, citing the island’s telecommunications service.
It said a Chinese fishing vessel is suspected to have severed the first cable some 50 kilometers (31 miles) out to sea. The NCC said six days later on February 8, a Chinese cargo ship rammed another.
Taiwan’s government stopped short of calling it a deliberate act on Beijing’s part, and there was no direct evidence to show Chinese ships were responsible.
Meanwhile the islanders were forced to connect to a limited Internet via microwave radio transmissions, a more mature technology, as a backup.
This means waiting for hours to send a text. Calls dropped, and videos were unplayable.
“A lot of tourists will cancel their bookings because there is no internet. Nowadays the internet plays a huge role in people’s lives,” said Chen, who lives on Beigan, one of Matsu’s main residential islands.
Apart from disrupting lives, the loss of internet cables, which appears innocuous, has huge implications for national security. As the full-scale invasion of Ukraine has shown, Russia has made internet infrastructure one of the key parts of its strategy.
Some experts suspect China may have deliberately cut the cables as part of its crackdown on the self-ruled island, which it considers part of its territory, to be reconnected by force if necessary.
China regularly sends warplanes and navy ships toward Taiwan as part of a strategy to intimidate the island’s democratic government. Since the war in Ukraine, concern about China’s aggression and Taiwan’s preparedness to face it has increased.
The cables were cut a total of 27 times over the past five years, based on data from Chunghwa Telecom, but it was not clear from which countries the ships came.
Taiwan’s coast guard chased the first cable-cutting fishing vessel on February 2, but it drifted back into Chinese waters, according to an official who was briefed about the incident and the matter being discussed publicly. was not authorized to do so.
Authorities found two Chinese ships in the area where the cables were cut, based on automatic identification system data similar to GPS, which showed the location of one ship.
“We cannot rule out that China deliberately destroyed these,” said Su Tzu-yun, a defense expert at the government’s think tank Institute for National Defense and Security Research, citing a study. To do this.
“Taiwan needs to invest more resources in repairing and protecting the cables,” the experts said.
Internet cables, which can be anywhere from 20 millimeters to 30 millimeters (0.79 in to 1.18 in) wide, are encased in steel armor in shallow water where they are more likely to run into ships.
Despite the protection, cables can easily be cut by ships and their anchors, or by fishing boats using steel nets.
Still, “this level of cable breakage is highly unusual, even in the shallow waters of the Taiwan Strait,” said Geoff Huston, chief scientist at the Asia Pacific Network Information Center, a nonprofit that manages and distributes Internet resources. Is. IP addresses for the region.
Without a stable internet, coffee shop owner Chiu Sih-chi said seeing a doctor for her toddler son’s cold became a hassle because previously they had to go to the hospital just to make an appointment.
A breakfast shop owner said she has lost thousands of dollars over the past few weeks because she usually takes orders online.
Customers used to come to his stall expecting the food to be ready when he did not even see their messages. Faced with unusual difficulties, the residents of Matsue find all kinds of ways to organize their lives.
A couple plans to deal with the upcoming peak season in Taiwan by having one person access their reservation system and the other via text messages. Wife Lin Hsien-wen extended her vacation to Taiwan during the off-season when she heard the internet back home was not working and was returning to Matsue later in the week.
Some enterprising residents went to the other shore to buy SIM cards from China Telecom, although they only work well in places close to the Chinese coast, which is only 10 kilometers (6.21 mi) away at its closest point.
Others, like bed-and-breakfast owner Tsao Li-yu, would go to Chunghwa Telecom’s office to use a Wi-Fi hot spot that the company had set up for locals to use in the meantime.
“I was going to work at (Chungwa Telecom),” Tsao joked.
Chunghwa had installed a microwave transmission as a backup for the residents. Broadcast from Yangmingshan, a mountain just outside Taiwan’s capital Taipei, the relay beams signals some 200 kilometers (124 miles) across Matsue.
Residents said that since Sunday, the speed was very high.
Wang Chung Ming, the head of Lianchiang County, as Matsu Island is officially called, said he and Matsu’s legislators went to Taipei immediately after the internet outage to ask for help, and were told that they would not have any future internet access. Will get priority in backup plans.
Taiwan’s digital affairs ministry publicly asked low-Earth orbit satellite operators to bid to provide internet in a backup plan after it saw Russia’s cyber attacks in the Ukraine invasion, ministry chief Audrey Tang said. The Washington Post told the last fall.
Still, the plan has stalled as a law in Taiwan requires providers to have at least 51 percent domestic shareholder ownership.
A spokesperson for the digital ministry directed queries about the progress of backup plans to the National Communications Commission. Relying on microwave transmission as a backup option, the NCC said it would set up a monitoring system for the undersea cable.
Many Pacific island nations, before they started using internet cables, relied on satellites ‘and some still do’ as a backup, said Jonathan Brewer, a New Zealand-based telecommunications consultant who works in Asia and the Pacific.
There is also the question of cost. Repairing the cables is expensive, with an initial estimate of 30 million New Taiwan Dollars (USD 1 million) just for the ships’ work.
“The Chinese boats that damaged the cable should be held accountable and compensated for the exorbitantly expensive repairs,” said Wen Li, head of the Matsu chapter of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party.
Wang, the head of Lianjiang County, said he mentioned the cable during a recent trip to China, where he met with a China Mobile executive. He offered to send technicians to help. But compensation, he said, would require hard evidence on who did it.
China’s Taiwan Affairs Office did not respond to a faxed request for comment. For now, the only thing residents can do is wait. The earliest the cable-laying ships could arrive is April 20, as there are a limited number of ships that can do the job.
A month without functional internet has its advantages too. Bed-and-breakfast owner Chen Yu-Lin has felt more at peace.
It was tough the first week, but Chen quickly got used to it. “From a life point of view, I think it is more comfortable because you get less calls,” he said, adding that he was spending more time with his son, who usually plays online games.
In a web cafe where off-duty soldiers were playing offline games, the effect was the same.
“Our relationship has become a little closer,” said one soldier, who gave only his first name, adding Samuel in general. When there was the Internet, everyone lives on their own, and now we’re more connected.