The economy is weak, but you wouldn’t know it from Time Warner Cable’s 2Q earnings. The No. 2 cable operator reports net income of $420M on revenues of $4.9B, up 4.4% vs the same period last year. Earnings, at $1.24 a share, zoomed past the $1.16 that analysts expected. The company attributes the increase to strong sales of business and residential phone and broadband services. The core home pay TV business didn’t help, though: Time Warner Cable lost 130,000 subscribers in the quarter ending up with 12.1M. It also says that sales for VOD and premium channels were down. Revenues for residential video, at $2.68B, only fell 0.1% due to a price hike and company efforts to upsell customers to higher-priced service tiers. While that may worry investors, they may be more impressed by the fact that Time Warner Cable returned $1B to them in the quarter — $863M from share repurchases and $163M from a dividend. The company is authorized to buy back an additional $1.8B in stock.