Taiwan's disaster roaming project enhances telecoms

台灣的災難漫遊計畫強化了通訊

Ministry of Digital Affairs funds 4-year project to allow cell phone users to work across multiple telecom services


TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — The Ministry of Digital Affairs (MODA) is undertaking a four-year NT$6 billion (US$197 million) project to upgrade domestic telecommunications with a special “disaster roaming” feature.

At the heart of the project is a program to enable cell phone users to have the ability to work across a variety of domestic telecoms in the event a telecom base station is destroyed through natural disaster or war. Telecoms would have to share customer information amongst carriers to ensure disaster roaming services operate smoothly, per UDN.

The current Russia-Ukraine war has shown that when telecom base stations are attacked and disconnected from the internet, people can still connect to other operational base stations to perform cross-network roaming.

The National Communications Commission (NCC) initiated discussions with various telecom operators. Roaming is mostly a commercial activity which is common with regard to international travel, but more difficult to implement domestically when carriers share overlapping areas.

In some remote areas of Taiwan, domestic telecoms with poor signal coverage in certain locations occasionally sign contracts with other telecoms to provide service to their customers. Disaster roaming would be similar to this shared signal coverage in remote areas, supporting a minimum of voice communication.

According to Cheng Ming-tsung (鄭明宗), the director of MODA's Department of Communications and Cyber Resilience, the first step to enabling disaster roaming during an emergency includes identifying customers of different domestic telecoms. A second step would be eliminating any software or hardware upgrade to enable cell phone users to operate across different platforms should a national defense mobilization order be given.

From 2024 to 2027, a four year research and verification of cross-industry mobile network access and backup user database architecture project will be implemented. MODA says the project will also use non-geostationary orbit satellites as the backhaul link of base stations to conduct roaming tests.