Stephen Shankland/CNET

Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son says his company's $20.1 billion acquisition offer is best for Sprint, even though Dish Nework's bid is higher.

Speaking Tuesday at an event in Tokyo, Son told reporters the LTE network efficiencies that his company can bring to Sprint would dramatically improve the value of Sprint's network to customers. And that's all because of an LTE variant that Softbank already uses, called TD-LTE.

Softbank has been using TD-LTE for quite some time, and as Son points out, it's doing so in Japan "on a large scale."

TD (Time Division)-LTE presents one main advantage over the traditional, Frequency-Division Duplexing (FDD) technology it competes with: flexibility. With TD-LTE, a single spectrum block is used and carriers can decide how frequencies can be used within it. Similar to home broadband, TD-LTE allows carriers to dedicate little frequency to simple things, like sending e-mails, and more to bandwidth-intensive tasks like downloading applications or large files. The result is a more efficient system than what's currently available in the U.S.

Clearwire, the company that Sprint is trying to acquire, uses the TD-LTE spectrum. In his remarks to reporters on Tuesday, Son said that his company's expertise, coupled with the Clearwire buy, should dramatically improve Sprint's LTE efforts and give it a superior offering in the U.S. market. In other words, Softbank would be a better partner.

Son's comments come just a few days after he said that Dish Network's unsolicited bid to acquire Sprint for $25.5 billion is "ridiculous."

(Via The Verge)