Increases in theft of our signal or our competitors' signal could limit our subscriber growth and cause subscriber churn to increase. Our signal encryption has been compromised by theft of service, and even though we continue to respond to compromises of our encryption system with security measures intended to make signal theft of our programing more difficult, theft of our signal is increasing. We cannot assure you that we will be successful in reducing or controlling theft of our service.
During 2005, we replaced our smart cards in order to reduce theft of our service. However, the smart card replacement did not fully secure our system, and we have since implemented software patches and other security measures to help protect our service. Nevertheless, these security measures are short-term fixes and we remain susceptible to additional signal theft. Therefore, we have developed a plan to replace our existing smart cards and/or security chips to re-secure our signals for a longer term which will be implemented later this year. The project is expected to take approximately nine to twelve months to complete. While our existing smart cards installed in 2005 remain under warranty, we could incur operational costs in excess of $50 million in connection with our smart card replacement program. __________________ Please do NOT PM me, I do NOT condone satellite signal theft. For best results, sub! I do..