Sprint bids: Dish's Ergen swings back at Softbank's Son

• Responding to SoftBank%27s Son%2C Dish chairman says his bid for Sprint is superior
• Says he was disappointed by Son%27s %27personal attacks%27 and predicts Son will raise his offer
• Says Sprint%27s merger with an American company will be better for operations%2C network expansion

The high-stakes bidding war for control of the third-largest U.S. wireless carrier is turning into a heated verbal joust.

In an interview with USA TODAY on Wednesday, Dish Network Chairman Charlie Ergen swung back at Japan's SoftBank, reiterating his stance that his bid to buy Sprint Nextel is financially superior, waving a figurative American flag by questioning SoftBank's ability to grow a U.S. wireless carrier from an ocean away, and predicting that SoftBank will eventually raise its bidding price.

"We're offering a higher price. That's just math," he said. "We are an American company, and the modernization of Sprint's network will have to be done from the U.S. You have to climb the towers here, and you'll have to have U.S. employees who speak English. Operations command control will be in America. That's good for jobs. It doesn't mean that the other guys are bad. It's just that we have an advantage."

Last October, wireless carrier SoftBank offered to buy 70% of Sprint Nextel for $20 billion. Eager to diversify into the growing wireless business, Dish, the third-largest U.S. pay-TV service provider, submitted a competing bid last month -- $25.5 billion in cash and stock for all of Sprint Nextel.

Though Sprint trails AT&T Wireless and Verizon Wireless in customer count and the reach of its fastest data network, the company is an attractive acquisition target because of its valuable airwaves and its 51% ownership of another carrier, Clearwire. Sprint and Clearwire have more wireless spectrum in the U.S. for future expansion than other carriers, analysts say.

Dish's bid clearly unnerved SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son. In a press conference in Tokyo on Tuesday, covered by the Associated Press, Son called Dish's offer "incomplete and illusory" and said a merger with Dish would load the combined company with debt that will burden capital improvement efforts, he said.

Son also predicted he'll win the bidding war without raising his offer.

With expertise in building wireless networks in Japan, SoftBank would inject technical know-how that Dish can't match, Son said. "(Ergen) himself admits he's an amateur to our mobile industry," he said.

Son's characterization didn't sit well with Ergen. Lauding SoftBank as "an accomplished business," Ergen mentioned that Dish grew without previous experience in the satellite business, much the way SoftBank evolved from technology investor to wireless carrier.

"I was disappointed by the conference. It was more (about) personal attack and personality than it was about business," Ergen says. "It's insulting to managers of Sprint to say that the only team that knows how to build a network is in Japan."

If successful in his bid, Ergen plans to merge the two operations by offering bundled services -- similar to AT&T and Verizon's packages of data, voice and TV -- and bet the future on the "TV-anywhere" trend.

Consumers will be able to watch regular TV programming on their laptops and tablets outside the home as video is streamed through its wireless networks, Ergen says.

The no-limit policy Sprint currently touts for its data plans would likely continue under Dish-Sprint because the increased spectrum can accommodate more traffic, Ergen says. "Our pipe would be big enough. We think Sprint's no-data cap can continue."

Ergen wants to use the combined companies' spectrum -- particularly, that of Clearwire -- to expand wireless networks in urban areas with a Wi-Fi-like experience.

About 40 million ex-urban homes that aren't connected to a land-line broadband network, such as cable or Verizon FIOS, can be served by the companies' cell towers, which will transmit data to a soda bottle-size antenna installed outside their homes. "It'll give you very high speeds in a wireless manner," Ergen says.

For rural customers, Dish will deliver Internet through its satellites.

These plans are, so far, just words, Son said Tuesday. SoftBank's wireless-only focus and ongoing investment in improving Sprint's network will benefit customers in the long run, he said.

"I just deliver the results, instead of big-mouthing about the future," Son said. "Do you want to attach a satellite dish to your smartphone? ... I don't see any real meaningful value that he (Ergen) can offer to the smartphone customers."

Dish's home-field advantage as an American company, Ergen predicts, will work to its favor.

SoftBank's Japanese corporate culture will be "materially different" than Sprint, and the merger integration could suffer as a result, he says. "If you have to lead tens of thousands of employees, culture matters," he says. "We're more culturally and geographically aligned with Sprint."

Ergen concedes that SoftBank's Japanese heritage ultimately will not be the deciding factor in regulatory approval. Concerns about foreign ownership of U.S. spectrum have subsided through the years. Deutsche Telekom has owned T-Mobile USA for a decade. But Ergen noted that some U.S. lawmakers had questioned SoftBank's purchase of equipment from Chinese supplier Huawei, which allegedly has ties to China's government. In March, SoftBank and Sprint agreed to stop buying from Huawei.

"Spectrum is a national security issue. You want that network to be secure," Ergen says.

Despite the lingering geopolitical and operational issues, Sprint's shareholders will decide on the winning bid based on numbers, Ergen predicts.

"This is a bidding war. Committee (executives) at Sprint don't need (me) to lecture them on math," Ergen says. "That's the way capitalism works in the U.S."

Son maintains that Dish's takeover would load a combined company with as much as $50 billion in debt.

While more indebted, the combined company would have more assets in spectrum, video contracts and programming and the ability to install equipment in people's homes nationwide, Ergen argues.

Ergen, who used to be a professional poker player, is confident that Son will raise his offering price. "That was the biggest bluff of the day," says Ergen. "It's like the guy who says 'to be honest with you.' "