Time Warner Cable rightfully caught hell from consumers earlier this month when it announced it wanted to expand its “experiment” with metered broadband to additional markets it serves.

Like many others, we were skeptical – eye-rolling skeptical – of TWC’s argument it had to change from a traditional, all-you-can-upload-and-download broadband pricing structure to a metered one in order to survive and prosper.

“We need a viable model to be able to support the infrastructure of the broadband business,” Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt told Business Week in an interview. “We made a mistake early on by not defining our business based on the consumption dimension.”

There’s just one problem, however. When TWC released its first quarter financial results (PDF) this week the hard numbers completely contradicted the company’s argument that it was being forced to go to a metered broadband model. In fact, the numbers showed that TWC was doing very, very well by every measure under its current, all-you-can-eat pricing structure.

Among the highlights:

• TWC’s revenues from broadband during the first three months of this year rose 11% percent over the first quarter of 2008, climbing from $994 million to $1.1 billion.

• At the same time, TWC’s costs to provide broadband service to its customers dropped 18%, from $40 million to $33 million. That dramatic drop in costs came even though its number of subscribers grew from 7.9 million to 8.6 million.

• Overall, TWC’s profits were down for the quarter, falling from $242 million to $164 million. But the company says the drop in profits was due mostly to restructuring costs rung up when it was spun off in March from its parent company, Time Warner.

Before shelving its plan a couple of weeks ago in the face of consumer outrage and the threat of possible congressional action, TWC argued that a flat rate broadband billing structure—say, $50 per month—is unfair to the low-volume users who make up 30 percent of its customer base.

The company said tiered pricing would be a more equitable approach. “When you go to lunch with a friend, do you split the bill in half if he gets the steak and you have a salad?” asked TWC Chief Operating Officer Lanel Hobbs at the time. He said under the proposed rate plan, high-volume users would pay $150 for “virtually unlimited usage.”

TWC has left the possibility of metered broadband on the table, even though the company has shelved its plans for additional trials for the time being.

It should be noted that TWC is the only major U.S. broadband provider to go this far toward a metered pricing structure. Hopefully the sharp and swift consumer fury that hit TWC will give the others pause before heading down a similar road.

But it should also be noted that in shelving its plans, TWC said the main problem was inadequate consumer education efforts and pledged to do better – on consumer education efforts.

If we may, we would like to offer TWC a little bit of advice: Stop trying to put one over on your broadband customers. There’s no amount of “consumer education” that can change the fact that TWC is making a whole lot of money selling broadband service -- without metered pricing.