RETN launches sixth Taiwan subsea route, diversifying and strengthening Taiwan network resilience

Taipei, Hong Kong, London - September 28, 2026 – RETN, the leading independent global network service provider, announces the addition of a sixth subsea route to its high-capacity network backbone for the Taiwan market, further diversifying and strengthening network resilience for customers in and beyond the island.

In response to recurring subsea cable disruptions around Taiwan and growing demand for data‑intensive workloads such as artificial intelligence, RETN now operates six physically diverse subsea routes serving Taiwan: four between Taipei and Hong Kong and two between Taipei and Tokyo. The newly added Taipei-Hong Kong route increases the number of independent international paths available to customers, providing greater flexibility and resilience when individual cables are impaired.

These routes are intentionally engineered to avoid single points of failure. They terminate in multiple, geographically separate data centres rather than a single centralised carrier hotel, and they leverage different landing points, terrestrial corridors, and equipment vendors. This design reduces the risk that a disruption in one corridor or facility will cascade across all of a customer’s international traffic.

Recent cable disruptions across Asia, particularly around Taiwan, have shown how quickly a single fault—or several faults within the same corridor—can lead to congestion, higher latency, and packet loss on alternative long-haul routes.

RETN’s experience during the 2024 Red Sea cable crisis demonstrated the value of this approach. To minimise customer impact, RETN combined diverse terrestrial and subsea paths across different landing points, corridors, and suppliers wherever possible. As a result, approximately 60–70% of affected traffic was successfully rerouted via TRANSKZ, a terrestrial network system that directly connects Europe and Asia, helping to maintain service continuity during a period of widespread subsea disruptions.

Oswald Huang, Managing Director of RETN for the Taiwan market, 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.”