Time Warner Cable spent much of April pushing scary statistics about internet hogs, futilely attempting to convince the press and its eight million broadband customers that downloading was killing the company's bottom line and would lead to internet Armageddon if its current buffet-style plan was not replaced with a pay-by-the-byte model.

But, on Wednesday, the company released financial results (.pdf) that put the lie to the company's campaign, showing that TWC's own broadband bill fell nearly 20 percent when comparing the first quarter of 2009 to 2008. That's the same time period that the company direly warned about, claiming its users were using 40 percent more broadband than the year before.

In fact, the company's costs to provide that high-speed data fell 18 percent from $40 million to $33 million, even as the number of subscribers jumped from 7.9 million to 8.6 million.

As for revenue, that went up 11 percent, from $994 million to $1.1 billion.

But surely, profit fell due to those pesky YouTube watchers?

No, the company, which also offers voice and cable television services, posted a net profit of $164 million for the quarter, down from 2008 first quarter revenue of $242 million. The company attributed the decline mostly to restructuring costs relate to being spun off from Time Warner in March.

That's right. Time Warner Cable pulled in over a billion in revenues from broadband subscribers in the first quarter, while spending less than $35 million to transport the bits. That $35 million also includes at least some customer care support costs, as well.

That's because bandwidth — especially across the internet's backbone — is still getting cheaper, even as usage grows.

That's almost the exact same picture Wired.com found earlier this month when it compared TWC's 2008 and 2009 annual reports.

Today, Time Warner Cable Chief Executive Officer Glenn Britt told (.pdf) investors, "Cable is a very good business, and our operations are strong and growing despite a challenging economy. We continue to generate very healthy free cash flow which will enable us to reduce debt over the next year."

That's far from what they had to say in defense of their tiered pricing trials.

Internet demand is rising at a rate that could outpace capacity within a few years. According to industry analysts, the infrastructure may not be able to accommodate the explosion of online content by 2012. This could result in Internet brownouts. It will take a lot of money to fix the problem. Rather than raising prices on all customers or limiting usage, we think the fairest approach is to move to a tiered model in which users pay more if they use more.[...] We have increasing variable costs and we have to continue to invest in the network itself. [...] If we don’t act, consumers’ Internet experience will suffer. Sitting still is not an option.

And still, TWC gets angry when its customers and critics argue that the company is discouraging heavy internet usage in order to protect its traditional cable television revenues.

In response to political pressure, Time Warner Cable temporarily shelved its trials of the pricing program on April 16 "while the customer education process continues," but making it clear they would try again once they had a better PR strategy.

One suspects that education won't include any mention of these numbers, either.

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