Between 14:30 and 15:00 on 10 August 2026, mobile data speeds were deliberately reduced across seven jurisdictions in central Taiwan — Taichung, Chiayi City, and Miaoli, Changhua, Nantou, Yunlin and Chiayi counties — as the civil component of the Han Kuang exercise. It was Taiwan's first mobile-network throttling exercise. The National Communications Commission published the scope roughly three weeks in advance, including the services that would be excluded from the throttling: voice calls, emergency calls to 110 and 119, text messaging and Public Warning cell-broadcast alerts, together with fixed broadband, Wi-Fi carried over fixed broadband, landline telephony, and military and other dedicated networks. As officially described, the exercise simulated the reduced bandwidth that emergency network measures — congestion, disaster roaming and traffic prioritisation — would produce; the regulator stated that it was not an internet shutdown. Wire reporting gives the ceiling applied to mobile web traffic as 256 Kbps, described elsewhere as roughly one per cent of normal 4G and 5G capacity.
Conflict coverage · Taiwan Strait
Taiwan runs its first mobile-network throttling exercise
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Effects & resilience
Why it mattersThe significant thing is not that connectivity was degraded but that the degradation was scoped, announced and bounded — and that the boundary was drawn around exactly the services a population needs in an emergency. A state that can publish, in advance, which of its own communications it is willing to give up and which it is not, is describing a continuity doctrine rather than running a stunt. This module's standing position is that resilience is the trackable part of deterrence because programmes are either delivered or not; this is delivery, and it is the first of its kind. What the exercise does NOT do is reproduce a wartime cause. Throttling reproduces a condition — degraded mobile data — through an administrative mechanism. Infrastructure damage, power disruption, cyber intrusion, electronic interference and network saturation are separate hypothetical mechanisms that could produce a comparable condition in a conflict, and none of them was simulated, tested or observed here. Vigil makes no assessment of how the public or agencies performed.
Confidence: HighSources: National Communications Commission — Taiwan · Central News Agency / Focus Taiwan · Taipei Times · Associated PressMethodologyCorrections
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2 records that this event names, or that name it. Every one is an explicit reference in a published record — nothing here is inferred from subject matter.
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