Taiwan Tang Taiwan Digital Affairs Minister (Audrey Tang)
Tan believes that for Taiwan the greatest danger is the destruction of the physical points of communication of the island: the three largest telecommunication providers and their power sources. She stated that China “knows” where they are located, and can “hack, block or destroy” in case of a “crisis” – thus denoting incidents associated with the conflict with the PRC.
To increase cyber resistance, Taiwan plans to place 700 satellite receivers throughout the island. They should be configured to receive communications from a few satellite constellations (a group of satellites working together to ensure a certain function, for example, navigation or communications) in low and middle earth orbit. The government announced a competition for research institutes for participation in the round of testing and verification of the concept.
Among potential providers, Tan called SpaceX from Starlink Inc., Oneweb, Project Kuiper from Amazon.com Inc. and Franco-Luxembourg company SES Global.
Taiwan government would like to have a choice between different companies in this competition and ensure the reliability of communication. Now Taiwan is connected to the outside world through 14 underwater cables. The available satellite infrastructure can provide only 0.01 % of the required island of the capacity of communication channels. Therefore, satellite systems cannot be a full reserve infrastructure. Even the installation of 700 stations of reception of a satellite network will not be able to satisfy the needs of the island in a quick connection, given that 23 million people live in Taiwan. The authorities of the island allocated $ 18 million for the next two years to test such design decisions. Audrey Tan believes that the network and information infrastructure of Taiwan is already undergoing mass attacks, probably carried out by Chinese hackers. In such conditions, plans to create a duplicate communication infrastructure by the end of 2024 seem very brave.