Yuanli, Taiwan

Yuanli, Taiwan: Submarine Cable Landing Point

Yuanli is a township in Miaoli County, on the western coast of Taiwan, where one submarine cable makes landfall. Though modest in scale relative to Taiwan's busiest landing points, Yuanli participates in the country's submarine cable network through the Taiwan Penghu Kinmen Matsu No.2 system, a domestic cable connecting Taiwan's main island with its outlying island territories. The corridor served by this cable is entirely intra-national, linking the Taiwanese mainland to the islands of Penghu, Kinmen, and Matsu.

Taiwan's submarine cable infrastructure spans 21 landing points across the island and its territories. Yuanli contributes to this network as a single-cable landing point, hosting the TPKM2 system, which connects communities across Taiwan's administered island groups rather than reaching international destinations.

Cables Landing at Yuanli

Taiwan Penghu Kinmen Matsu No.2 (TPKM2) is a 467-kilometre submarine cable that reached ready-for-service status in 2000. The cable connects multiple landing points within Taiwan, linking the main island to the outlying island groups of Penghu, Kinmen, and Matsu. As its name indicates, all endpoints on the TPKM2 system are within Taiwan, making it a domestic inter-island cable rather than an international route. Yuanli serves as one of its landing points on the Taiwanese main island.

Regional Context

Among Taiwan's 21 submarine cable landing points, Yuanli ranks in the upper 62 percent by cable count, hosting one cable. This places it below larger hubs such as Toucheng, which lands nine cables, and Tanshui, which lands eight, as well as multi-cable points like Dongyin, Dawu, Fangshan, and Huxi Township. Yuanli's role is therefore that of a specialised, single-cable terminus focused on domestic inter-island connectivity rather than a broad international gateway.

Network Role

Yuanli functions as a single-cable terminus within Taiwan's submarine cable graph, serving the TPKM2 system's role of maintaining fixed undersea links between the Taiwanese main island and the country's offshore island territories. Rather than contributing to intercontinental or international bandwidth, this landing point supports the intra-national connectivity that binds Taiwan's geographically dispersed administered islands to the main island's terrestrial networks.

Within the broader picture of Taiwan's submarine cable geography, Yuanli represents a category of landing point dedicated to domestic inter-island service - a distinct function from the international-facing terminals that define Taiwan's largest cable hubs. Its presence in the network underscores that submarine cable infrastructure in Taiwan serves both global interconnection and the more localised requirement of reaching island communities that cannot be served by terrestrial means alone.