Time Warner CEO Glenn Britt just can’t get his mind off overcharging customers for their broadband service.

Despite increasing broadband rates twice in the past two years, Britt is still convinced slapping usage limits and so-called “usage-based billing” is inevitable for the nation’s second largest cable operator.

“I think you will naturally see evolve a world where people who use very little broadband expect to pay less and people who use a whole lot, may complain, but in their hearts know they are going to pay more than somebody who reads email once a week,” Britt told investors at the Deutsche Bank Securities Media & Telecom Conference in Palm Beach, Fla. “I think there will always be an unlimited tier, but I think you’ll see the element of consumption introduced over time.”

Time Warner Cable attempted to impose an Internet Overcharging experiment in the communities of Rochester, N.Y.,  Greensboro, N.C., Austin, San Antonio, and Beaumont, Tex., in April 2009.  Customer backlash over a tripling in price of unlimited broadband service — to $150 a month, forced those plans to be shelved.

But Britt has continued to make positive statements about the practice of raising rates on broadband customers ever since, claiming a small percentage of heavy users were increasing costs.

But Time Warner’s own financial reports tell a different story.  While the company increasingly depends on broadband profits to impress investors in its quarterly reports, the costs (and investment in) broadband has been declining for several years.  Broadband is Time Warner’s single best performing product, and the company has raised rates from $39 a month to as much as $58 — a $19 monthly increase, over the past few years in many communities.  The highest prices are reserved for customers who only take broadband from the cable company and ignore their cable TV and phone services.

Britt also expressed increasing concern over cable TV cord-cutting, the practice of dropping cable television service, to investors as the company continues to lose more subscribers than it gains.

“We need to really to focus on that with a renewed intensity,” Britt said . “It is not acceptable to me to continue to slowly lose video customers every year. That has been going on for too long. We’re going to put renewed energy against that both in the product space and in marketing, to see if we can slow that down.”

To that end, Britt has hired a pricing expert to develop different prices for different types of customers.  The disparity in pricing is already widely apparent.  With some promotional customer retention offers now providing the company’s triple play package of Internet, phone and television service (with DVR) for as low as $79 a month, that is less than half the regular price of up to $163.85/mo charged to customers in states like California, without DVR service.

A bare bones basic package of a handful of national cable networks combined with local stations is selling for as low as $29.99 in northeast Ohio in a last ditch effort to hang on to economically challenged TV-only customers.