As Multichannel News reports, NCTA President & CEO Kyle McSlarrow today sent a personalized letter to every Member of Congress, suggesting that “serving the unserved” is the proper focus of broadband stimulus funding.

The letter, which is posted on NCTA’s website, lays out three key goals:

• Extend broadband facilities to unserved areas.
• Support programs that enable underserved populations to acquire and to make effective use of broadband service where it is already available.
• If funds remain, extend broadband facilities to underserved areas defined in terms of below-standard speed and other qualitative measures relative to today’s current generation broadband service.

This is very similar to the points that McSlarrow made in a video we made in late January.

UPDATE: Also see this coverage from BroadbandCensus.com.

Yesterday, NCTA President & CEO Kyle McSlarrow and Free Press Policy Director Ben Scott sent a letter to Senate leadership supporting the proposed broadband funding that the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) would oversee, but identifying several areas of the legislation should be refined as work on the stimulus package continues.

The letter (posted on NCTA’s website) supports unifying the $9 billion in broadband grant funding at NTIA; suggests that infrastructure funding should be targeted to areas without broadband service; and proposes that private broadband providers should be eligible to receive funding directly without the need for prior approval from governmental agencies.

This is in line with earlier comments from McSlarrow on how best to improve America’s broadband infrastructure. You may have seen last week’s video, in which he discussed what goals are best considered when debating current broadband stimulus proposals.

In December of last year, in a letter to Presidential Transition Team member Susan Crawford, McSlarrow offered the cable industry’s perspectives on the communications marketplace. In that letter, he proposed that stimulus measures should be targeted to unserved areas, should be technology-neutral, should address the needs of low-income households, and should recognize the need for making computers or laptops available to those that can’t afford such technology. Other issues are touched on in the letter, which you can also find on NCTA’s website.