The first submarine cable directly linking Taiwan and China was completed on Friday, with the telecommunications operators who built it expecting it to improve cross-strait telecommunications quality and to cut communications costs.
The Taiwan Strait Express-1, which links Fuzhou in China’s Fujian Province with Tamsui in northern Taiwan, is 270km long.
Builders adopted state-of-the-art fiber-optic technology for the system and routed it in a way that avoids the faultline region, to minimize the risks of possible damage from natural disasters such as earthquakes.
In future, communications between Taiwan and China will no longer have to be rerouted via the Asia-Euro Under-sea Optical Cable, the China-US Cable Network or the Asia Pacific Cable Network 2.
Both sides of the Taiwan Strait witnessed the completion of the system through a video hookup.
Douglas Hsu (徐旭東), chairman of Taiwan’s Far EasTone, said that the completion of the system will make cross-strait communications faster and more stable, and create a win-win situation for operators and users.
Telecoms operators suggested this was just the beginning of further cooperation between Taiwan and China in the sector.
Taiwan Mobile chairman Richard Tsai (蔡明興) said the system will provide a faster and higher-quality service for Taiwanese businessmen operating in China.
“Taiwan Mobile is planning further cooperation with China’s telecommunications operators on cloud computing services to tap into the vast business opportunities in digital convergence,” Tsai said.
China Mobile chief executive officer Li Yue (李躍) said that the latest system will not only upgrade the quality of cross-strait communications, but will also save costs for operators.
The military has spotted two Chinese warships operating in waters near Penghu County in the Taiwan Strait and sent its own naval and air forces to monitor the vessels, the Ministry of National Defense (MND) said. Beijing sends warships and warplanes into the waters and skies around Taiwan on an almost daily basis, drawing condemnation from Taipei. While the ministry offers daily updates on the locations of Chinese military aircraft, it only rarely gives details of where Chinese warships are operating, generally only when it detects aircraft carriers, as happened last week. A Chinese destroyer and a frigate entered waters to the southwest
A magnitude 6.1 earthquake struck off the coast of Yilan County at 8:39pm tonight, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said, with no immediate reports of damage or injuries. The epicenter was 38.7km east-northeast of Yilan County Hall at a focal depth of 98.3km, the CWA’s Seismological Center said. The quake’s maximum intensity, which gauges the actual physical effect of a seismic event, was a level 4 on Taiwan’s 7-tier intensity scale, the center said. That intensity level was recorded in Yilan County’s Nanao Township (南澳), Hsinchu County’s Guansi Township (關西), Nantou County’s Hehuanshan (合歡山) and Hualien County’s Yanliao (鹽寮). An intensity of 3 was
Instead of focusing solely on the threat of a full-scale military invasion, the US and its allies must prepare for a potential Chinese “quarantine” of Taiwan enforced through customs inspections, Stanford University Hoover fellow Eyck Freymann said in a Foreign Affairs article published on Wednesday. China could use various “gray zone” tactics in “reconfiguring the regional and ultimately the global economic order without a war,” said Freymann, who is also a nonresident research fellow at the US Naval War College. China might seize control of Taiwan’s links to the outside world by requiring all flights and ships entering or leaving Taiwan
The next minimum wage hike is expected to exceed NT$30,000, President William Lai (賴清德) said yesterday during an award ceremony honoring “model workers,” including migrant workers, at the Presidential Office ahead of Workers’ Day today. Lai said he wished to thank the awardees on behalf of the nation and extend his most sincere respect for their hard work, on which Taiwan’s prosperity has been built. Lai specifically thanked 10 migrant workers selected for the award, saying that although they left their home countries to further their own goals, their efforts have benefited Taiwan as well. The nation’s industrial sector and small businesses lay
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