MANILA, Philippines ? Local cable television firms lost over P4 billion in foregone revenues in 2009 due to the prevalence of illegal cable connections to over a million households in the country, the head of a cable TV group disclosed Wednesday.

With signal theft so rampant, the Philippine Cable TV Association (PCTA) estimates that for every legitimate cable TV line in the country today, there is one illegal connection.

?A recent estimate by Media Partners Asia shows that there are about 1.13 million legitimate cable TV subscribers in the country. But the ratio of legal to illegal lines is one to one,? PCTA president Leo Wong said.

This means that out of the over two million households in the country that have cable TV, half of these users do not pay, said Wong.

At an average monthly subscription fee of P300 to P350, Wong said cable firms could have lost as much as P4.2 billion in 2009. ?That is the amount of money that local cable operators could have made if everyone with cable paid for their lines,? he said.

The financial loss is lower than the P6 billion lost in previous years, due mainly to the declining cost of legitimate cable TV subscriptions.

To address the problem, Wong said the PCTA has lobbied for the passing of a law criminalizing cable TV signal theft.

Before the recent adjournment of Congress, Wong said the Senate was able to ratify their version of the bill. But the Lower House failed to pass its version of the legislation.

Wong said while some local government units have passed ordinances making signal theft illegal, ?we want a law that will cover the entire nation.?

He said the group has also asked the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) to stop issuing cable TV licenses that has allowed some providers from entering areas already sufficiently served by others. This, he said, would help keep the profit margins of existing providers up.

Eventually, he said, digital cable TV technology, which would be harder to tamper with, would eliminate the problem of illegal connections. But Wong said the technology might still be too expensive for Filipinos.