Time Warner Cable has been pretty quiet ever since they tried to force a pricey new metered billing broadband model on their customers, who saw the move for what it was (a money grab), generated a national media firestorm, and collectively sent the company running for the hills. That victory essentially put all ISPs who are interested in this model (again, not to be confused with value, or true per byte billing) into a holding pattern. It's pretty clear from interviews this week that Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt still dreams of imposing expensive overage fees on his customers:Earlier this year, Britt and Time Warner Cable executives spent months scaring people with tales of Internet brownouts, arguing that a flat-rate business model they've made a fortune off of was not profitable, and proclaiming that customers really wanted metered billing despite unprecedented, Internet-wide public backlash. When the execs finally did back off the plan, they heaped the blame on their customers -- arguing that they were simply confused and needed "education."

You can tell from Britt's quote that his mindset really hasn't seen a course correction. The question of "who pays" for Time Warner Cable's network upgrades ignores, again, that Time Warner Cable already makes more than enough money to upgrade to relatively inexpensive DOCSIS 3.0 technology. However, he's at least aware of the "controversial" nature of the company's decision -- so perhaps the company's second expected push toward low caps and high overage fees has been mothballed-- for now.