RETN Adds Sixth Taiwan Subsea Route

Publication Staff, RETN
September 28, 2026

RETN announced that it has added a sixth subsea route serving Taiwan to its high-capacity backbone. The latest addition connects Taipei and Hong Kong, bringing its Taiwan network to four routes between those cities and two between Taipei and Tokyo. The provider says all six routes are physically diverse, expanding customers' international path choices amid recurring cable disruptions and demand for data-intensive applications, including artificial intelligence.

The network design extends diversity beyond the subsea portions of the connections. RETN uses different landing points, terrestrial corridors and equipment vendors, with routes terminating at multiple geographically separate data centres instead of one centralised carrier hotel. According to the company, this arrangement is intended to avoid single points of failure and reduce the likelihood that a problem affecting one corridor or facility will disrupt all of a customer's international traffic.

That approach addresses operational problems highlighted by recent cable failures across Asia, especially around Taiwan. RETN notes that either an individual fault or several faults concentrated in one corridor can produce congestion, increased latency and packet loss on alternative long-haul connections. Its additional Taipei-Hong Kong route is intended to offer greater flexibility when cables are impaired, making the announcement primarily about resilience and independent routing options rather than simply a higher route count.

RETN also cited its response to the 2024 Red Sea cable crisis as evidence of the value of combining terrestrial and submarine paths. During that disruption, it used different landing points, corridors and suppliers wherever possible. Approximately 60–70% of affected traffic was successfully rerouted through TRANSKZ, the terrestrial network system directly connecting Europe and Asia. The company says this helped preserve service continuity during widespread subsea disruption, illustrating the operational role of alternatives outside an affected cable corridor.

Oswald Huang, RETN's managing director for Taiwan, said network providers should maintain four separate paths to each major market at minimum, preferably five or more, with terrestrial alternatives included. The sixth Taiwan route is now part of RETN's operating network. Huang also outlined plans to interconnect with more local data centres in support of Taiwan's Smart Technology Island vision, although the announcement provides no timetable for those further connections.

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