TAIPEI - Lawmakers in Taiwan are set to approve changes to a law that will open the door for Starlink to operate its satellite internet services on the island, which is seeking to secure its communications in case of a conflict with China.

Taiwan faces the constant threat of an invasion by Beijing, which claims it is part of its territory and in recent years has ramped up military pressure on its tiny neighbour.

The self-ruled island, which has no low Earth orbit satellites of its own, relies on subsea telecoms cables to connect it to the rest of the world.

Its Chunghwa Telecom has struck deals with several foreign satellite companies, including European firm Eutelsat, to provide back-up telecommunications in case of war or natural disaster.

But Elon Musk’s Starlink, which dominates the global satellite communications sector with thousands of satellites in orbit and operations in dozens of countries, is not among them.

Legal requirements for telecoms operators to have a Taiwanese chairperson and foreign ownership caps of 49 percent have deterred the firm from entering Taiwan’s market, lawmakers told AFP.

To boost the resiliency of the island’s phone and internet services, they want to amend the Telecommunications Management Act to allow a case-by-case review process that could exempt companies, such as Starlink, from these rules.

“To put it bluntly, if a cross-strait conflict were to break out and CCP (Beijing) cut all of Taiwan’s submarine cables... Taiwan would have virtually no means of communicating with the outside world,” said Kuomintang (KMT) legislator Huang Chien-hao.

“We’ve also seen in the recent wars, including the Iran-US war, the war between Ukraine and Russia, and during the initial unrest in Iran, much of the information ...