You-Hao Lai, Deputy Director of the Democratic Governance Program at the Research Institute for Democracy, Society, and Emerging Technology (DSET), and DSET Adjunct Research Fellow Ren-Wei Chang recently co-authored an op-ed, Ukraine’s real lesson for Taiwan’s communications resilience, for the international affairs platform 9DASHLINE. They argue that current policy discussions on Taiwan’s communications resilience focus largely on protecting undersea cables and developing low-Earth orbit satellite backup, while paying insufficient attention to whether Taiwan’s domestic network infrastructure and everyday digital services could continue operating if international connectivity were disrupted. The authors call on the government to incorporate “domestic operability” into its national communications resilience strategy, ensuring that critical services can maintain minimum functionality when external connections are lost.
The op-ed examines the factors that have enabled Ukraine to maintain wartime communications. Following Russia’s full-scale invasion, Ukraine transferred more than 10 petabytes of data from 42 government agencies and other institutions to overseas cloud servers, maintaining access through 18 physical cross-border routes. Ukraine’s ability to remain online amid sustained Russian attacks has depended not only on overseas cloud backups and Starlink satellite services, but also on its diverse and decentralised domestic network architecture. The country has 20 internet exchange points (IXPs), while its three largest internet service providers hold only around 33 per cent of the market. This allows domestic traffic to continue moving through alternative routes even when some external connections are disrupted.
Taiwan, by contrast, relies almost entirely on undersea cables for international connectivity and has no overland alternatives. Its three largest internet service providers account for approximately 80 per cent of the market, while the country has only seven active IXPs, five of which are concentrated in Taipei. The authors warn that this highly concentrated structure could reduce the number of independent transmission routes and domestic fallback options available during a crisis.
The article also cites a 2026 assessment of 1,859 commonly used websites in Taiwan. The findings show that 47 per cent depend directly on overseas infrastructure, while another 42.3 per cent rely on multinational cloud nodes located in Taiwan. However, backend functions such as login authentication, data storage and request management may still depend on systems located abroad. In other words, nearly nine in ten commonly used services could either become unavailable or face significant uncertainty if international connectivity were disrupted.
LINE illustrates the potential consequences. Even when both users are located in Taiwan, establishing a call may still require authentication through overseas servers. During a cable outage, such domestic communications could therefore consume scarce satellite bandwidth, potentially crowding out essential external communications for government agencies, emergency services, healthcare providers and other critical functions.
To strengthen existing policies, the op-ed proposes three measures. First, Taiwan should conduct a nationwide “cable-cut operability review” of critical and commonly used digital services, testing whether complete user journeys—from login and payment to notification—can be carried out locally. Second, critical service providers and multinational cloud companies should be required to conduct regular “local mode” exercises, with these requirements incorporated into government procurement and critical infrastructure audits. Third, the geographic decentralisation and resilience of domestic IXPs should be treated as national-security infrastructure, with greater investment in local traffic exchange capacity.
The article stresses that Ukraine’s experience demonstrates that communications resilience is a system rather than a single technology. Protecting undersea cables and developing satellite backup are indispensable, but Taiwan must also ensure that its domestic digital infrastructure can sustain the daily lives of 23 million people and maintain essential public services when international connectivity is lost. Policymakers must therefore look not only to the seabed and the sky, but also to Taiwan’s domestic networks and infrastructure.
Note: On July 21, the government announced that Taiwan’s 2026 Urban Resilience Exercises would include mobile network throttling for the first time. The exercise is scheduled to take place across 14 cities and counties in central and northern Taiwan in August to test the government’s response capabilities and the public’s use of backup communications during network disruption. Although the exercise will reduce mobile network speeds rather than cut connectivity—and therefore differs from the loss of international connectivity examined in the DSET op-ed—it nevertheless shows that communications disruption and the continuity of critical services are becoming increasingly important elements of Taiwan’s resilience preparedness.
