RETN adds sixth subsea route to boost Taiwan resilience

RETN has added a sixth subsea internet route serving Taiwan, bringing its total to six physically separate international routes connected to the market.

The new route links Taipei and Hong Kong, adding to four existing Taipei-Hong Kong connections and two between Taipei and Tokyo. RETN introduced the additional path after repeated cable disruptions around Taiwan highlighted the risks of relying on fewer international connections.

According to the network provider, its Taiwan network spreads traffic across different cable landing points, terrestrial corridors, data centres, and equipment vendors. That approach is designed to limit the impact of any single outage and prevent failures from spreading across a customer's broader international traffic.

Taiwan has faced growing scrutiny over the resilience of its digital infrastructure as subsea cable faults in the region have disrupted communications and increased pressure on remaining routes. At the same time, operators have been managing rising demand for data-heavy services, including artificial intelligence workloads, which require stable international capacity and low-latency connections.

Against that backdrop, customers in Taiwan and elsewhere are seeking greater route diversity rather than simply more bandwidth, RETN said. The company routes international traffic into the island through multiple facilities instead of concentrating it at a single carrier site.

Route diversity

The latest addition increases the number of separate international paths available through RETN's Taiwan network. This gives customers more flexibility when individual cables are impaired, particularly when faults affect more than one route within the same corridor, according to the company.

Recent disruptions across Asia have shown how quickly cable faults can lead to congestion, higher latency, and packet loss on alternative long-haul paths. Such incidents can force traffic onto a limited pool of backup routes, creating knock-on effects for enterprises, cloud providers, and digital platforms that depend on cross-border connectivity.

RETN cited its response to the 2024 Red Sea cable crisis as an example of how route diversity can reduce disruption. During that period of widespread cable problems, it combined terrestrial and subsea paths across different landing points, corridors, and suppliers to keep traffic moving.

According to RETN, about 60% to 70% of affected traffic during that episode was rerouted through TRANSKZ, a terrestrial network linking Europe and Asia. That helped maintain service continuity when multiple subsea systems were disrupted.

Taiwan focus

Oswald Huang, Managing Director of RETN for the Taiwan market, said the company believes operators should build at least four independent routes into major markets, with five or more preferred where possible, alongside terrestrial alternatives.

Huang said: "Recent cable disruptions have reinforced our view that network operators should plan for at least four independent routes per major geography, and preferably five or more, including terrestrial alternatives. Therefore, we have added an additional Taipei-Hong Kong subsea route to protect customers, with a plan to interconnect with more local data centres in support of Taiwan's 'Smart Technology Island' vision in the future. These investments give customers more connectivity options and greater route diversity, while reinforcing our long-term commitment to Taiwan and the wider Asia-Pacific market."

The Taiwan market has become increasingly important for international carriers as demand rises from cloud services, advanced manufacturing, semiconductor operations, and AI-related computing. Those sectors depend on resilient links to regional hubs such as Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Singapore, as well as onward routes into Europe and North America.

For operators, the issue is no longer limited to raw capacity. Physical separation between routes, varied landing points, different facilities, and diversified suppliers have become central to network planning as customers seek to reduce the risk of simultaneous outages.

RETN's Taiwan footprint now includes six independent subsea routes, split between connections to Hong Kong and Tokyo, with traffic distributed across multiple corridors and data centre locations.