Tainan, Taiwan

Tainan, Taiwan: Submarine Cable Landing Point

Tainan is a special municipality located on the western coast of southern Taiwan, facing the Taiwan Strait. As a coastal city, it serves as a landing point for submarine cable infrastructure connecting Taiwan's main island to its outlying island territories. One submarine cable lands at Tainan, the Taiwan Penghu Kinmen Matsu No.3 (TPKM3), which links multiple island groups that fall under Taiwan's administration.

The TPKM3 cable is a domestically oriented system, with both endpoints situated within Taiwan's territory. This makes Tainan's submarine cable infrastructure focused on intra-national connectivity rather than intercontinental or cross-border links. The cable supports communications between Taiwan's main island and its associated island chains in the Taiwan Strait.

Cables Landing at Tainan, Taiwan

The Taiwan Penghu Kinmen Matsu No.3 (TPKM3) is the sole submarine cable landing at Tainan. The system spans 510 kilometres and reached ready-for-service (RFS) status in 2013, listed with draft status. All endpoints of this cable are located within Taiwan, making it an entirely domestic submarine cable system. The cable connects Tainan to other points within Taiwan's island territories, including the Penghu, Kinmen, and Matsu island groups as indicated by the cable's name.

Regional Context

Within Taiwan's submarine cable network, which spans 21 cables across 21 landing points, Tainan ranks in the top 62 percent of landing points by cable count. The country's busiest landing points, such as Toucheng with nine cables and Tanshui with eight, host significantly more systems. Tainan's single-cable landing places it alongside other more modestly served locations in Taiwan such as Dawu and Fangshan, each of which also hosts two cables, though Tainan's single-cable count is the lower end of the national range.

Network Role

Tainan functions as a single-cable terminus rather than a multi-cable hub. Its role in the regional submarine cable graph is specifically tied to domestic inter-island connectivity, supporting communications between Taiwan's main island and the outlying territories served by the TPKM3 system. The cable's relatively short length of 510 kilometres, compared to Taiwan's national average submarine cable length of approximately 7,211 kilometres, reflects its intra-national rather than international function.

Within Taiwan's broader submarine cable geography, Tainan represents the southern main-island anchor of a domestic cable corridor spanning across the Taiwan Strait's island territories. This positions the landing point as a regionally specific node whose contribution lies in sustaining inter-island domestic connectivity within Taiwan's administrative geography.