Telecommunications giant Chunghwa Telecom Co yesterday held a ceremony to celebrate the completion of its first submarine cable system between Taiwan and China.
Telecommunications companies from both sides of the strait invested a total of NT$200 million (US$6.66 million) to construct the cable system that runs between Taiwan’s Kinmen County and China’s Xiamen City.
Chunghwa Telecom put in NT$100 million, while three major Chinese telecoms companies — China Telecom, China Unicom and China Mobile — provided the remaining funds.
The submarine system, which took 16 years to build, is the first of its kind and will make it easier to build similar projects, Minister of Transportation and Communications Mao Chi-kuo (毛治國) said at the celebrations.
The government holds the biggest stake in Chunghwa Telecom.
With regard to external telecommunications, cross-strait communications ranks in first place.
With telecommunications demand between the two sides growing rapidly, completion of the cross-strait cable system could not have been more timely, Chunghwa Telecom chairman Lu Shyue-ching (呂學錦) said.
The Kinmen-Xiamen submarine cable project was launched in 1996, after top-ranking officials from Taiwanese and Chinese telecommunications companies held a meeting about the project in Taiwan, Lu said.
The system consists of two cables, one of 11km that runs directly between Kinmen’s Lake Tzu and Xiamen’s Guanyin Mountain, and a 9.7km cable that runs between Kinmen’s Guningtou (古寧頭) and Xiamen’s Dadeng Island (大嶝島), Lu said.
The non-repeater submarine cable system has a bilateral transmission capacity of 90 Gigabits per second (Gbps), with Chunghwa Telecom allocating 90 Gbps bandwidth from the Taiwanese side and the three Chinese companies receiving 30 Gbps each.
Depending on demand, the bandwidth might be expanded in the future, Lu said.
He said the company is building three other cable systems in the region, with the aim of becoming a telecommunications leader in the Asia-Pacific region.
They are the Taiwan Strait Express, another cross-strait submarine cable; the South-East Asia Japan Cable System; and the Asia-Pacific Gateway, which is to link Taiwan, China, South Korea, Malaysia and Vietnam, Lu said.
The projects are expected to be completed by the end of 2014, he said.
A year-long renovation of Taipei’s Bangka Park (艋舺公園) began yesterday, as city workers fenced off the site and cleared out belongings left by homeless residents who had been living there. Despite protests from displaced residents, a city official defended the government’s relocation efforts, saying transitional housing has been offered. The renovation of the park in Taipei’s Wanhua District (萬華), near Longshan Temple (龍山寺), began at 9am yesterday, as about 20 homeless people packed their belongings and left after being asked to move by city personnel. Among them was a 90-year-old woman surnamed Wang (王), who last week said that she had no plans
TO BE APPEALED: The environment ministry said coal reduction goals had to be reached within two months, which was against the principle of legitimate expectation The Taipei High Administrative Court on Thursday ruled in favor of the Taichung Environmental Protection Bureau in its administrative litigation against the Ministry of Environment for the rescission of a NT$18 million fine (US$609,570) imposed by the bureau on the Taichung Power Plant in 2019 for alleged excess coal power generation. The bureau in November 2019 revised what it said was a “slip of the pen” in the text of the operating permit granted to the plant — which is run by Taiwan Power Co (Taipower) — in October 2017. The permit originally read: “reduce coal use by 40 percent from Jan.
China might accelerate its strategic actions toward Taiwan, the South China Sea and across the first island chain, after the US officially entered a military conflict with Iran, as Beijing would perceive Washington as incapable of fighting a two-front war, a military expert said yesterday. The US’ ongoing conflict with Iran is not merely an act of retaliation or a “delaying tactic,” but a strategic military campaign aimed at dismantling Tehran’s nuclear capabilities and reshaping the regional order in the Middle East, said National Defense University distinguished adjunct lecturer Holmes Liao (廖宏祥), former McDonnell Douglas Aerospace representative in Taiwan. If
‘SPEY’ REACTION: Beijing said its Eastern Theater Command ‘organized troops to monitor and guard the entire process’ of a Taiwan Strait transit China sent 74 warplanes toward Taiwan between late Thursday and early yesterday, 61 of which crossed the median line in the Taiwan Strait. It was not clear why so many planes were scrambled, said the Ministry of National Defense, which tabulated the flights. The aircraft were sent in two separate tranches, the ministry said. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Thursday “confirmed and welcomed” a transit by the British Royal Navy’s HMS Spey, a River-class offshore patrol vessel, through the Taiwan Strait a day earlier. The ship’s transit “once again [reaffirmed the Strait’s] status as international waters,” the foreign ministry said. “Such transits by