Posted on 08/13/2026 6:46:51 AM PDT by BenLurkin
TAIPEI, Taiwan — For 30 minutes, the internet in parts of Taiwan crawled.
The slowdown Thursday for people in the capital, Taipei, and six other cities and localities was part of the last phase of the island's annual Han Kuang exercises, military drills that began last week and aim to model a response to a possible Chinese military invasion.
Telecommunication operators slowed mobile web traffic to 256 Kbps, making it difficult to exchange anything other than texts. Usually, residents can access 5G in major cities.
Taiwan has stepped up the intensity of the Han Kuang drills, incorporating reservists and more civilians into the exercises with a focus on real-world scenarios. Previously, urban resilience drills in Taipei went largely unnoticed as they were not disruptive. For example, air raid drills in the metro station didn't stem the flow of passengers.
This year, integrating civilians and coordinating with local governments was a key part of the exercises, according to the Taipei Times.
Lai also visited a hospital as it simulated how to relocate its critical operations to underground facilities as part of the drills.
Taiwan is ramping up its defense exercises and purchases in response to heightened tensions with China, which claims the island as its own. China sends military planes, as well as Coast Guard ships and other vessels towards Taiwan on a daily basis and carries out large-scale military exercises from time to time.
Between Wednesday to Thursday morning, 18 Chinese warplanes and 11 navy ships operated around Taiwan, the island's Defense Ministry said.
(Excerpt) Read more at npr.org ...
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Text is extremely bandwidth efficient.
The telegraph transformed the world. Text is much faster than telegraphs.
Ruthless pre-emption. Built in to all the carrier networks. Hardened on the FirstNet network, which also has its own 5G core - a MOCN model.
The US did it right.
Text rules. You can do almost anything with text, except cat videos.
It’s a shame that text can’t do cat videos.
Wait, no it’s not.
ALL YOUR BASE...
Text only speed is probably alright for text, but sending graphics at that speed would be painfully slow.
.
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