Softbank Group said it is exploring options to monetize its stake in U.S. wireless carrier T-Mobile, a move that could raise as much as $20 billion and is part of a larger plan to sell off assets.

Softbank said Tuesday that it is exploring its options with the T-Mobile stake, which it acquired after it merged its U.S.-based wireless company Sprint with T-Mobile in April. According to reports, Softbank could sell as much as $20 billion of its T-Mobile stock, or about 200 million shares, as part of a larger effort to monetize about $40 billion in assets.

Softbank acquired its Sprint stake in 2013, but the wireless company never lived up to its expectations and sold the wireless carrier to T-Mobile in April in a deal valued at $26 billion. 

Softbank has struggled of late, mainly because of bad investments made by its Vision Fund, the $100 billion venture capital arm formed by Softbank founder, chairman and CEO Masayoshi Son in 2017 to invest in leading edge technologies. Big bets on tech companies like Uber and WeWorks fizzled -- it reduced the value of its WeWork stake from $47 billion to just $2.9 billion and its Uber interest lost about $10 billion in value -- leading to an $18 billion loss for the VC arm last year.

In a Securities and Exchange Commission filing, T-Mobile said Softbank is considering several options to monetize its investment, including a private placement offering, private negotiations with T-Mobile, Deutsche Telekom or third parties, derivative or hedging transactions, margin loans or other structured transactions.

Deutsche Telekom has been speculated as a possible buyer of Softbank’s T-Mobile shares, and though it would need to sign off on some transactions, has not commented on its intentions.

T-Mobile stock, down as much as 4% in early trading Tuesday, was priced at $103.03 each (down 1.6%) by the early afternoon. 

Making an announcement that will certainly be heard by aspiring U.S. providers of fiber backhaul, Ericsson announced that it has teamed with Deutsche Telekom to produce 40 Gbps speeds data transmission speeds and sub 100-microsecond latency with wireless backhaul.

Ericsson said the test recently took place at the Deutsche Telekom Service Center in Athens. The test used millimeter wave transmission over a distance of 1.4 kilometers.

”While fiber is an important part of our portfolio, it is not the only option for backhaul,” said Alex Jinseng Choi, senior VP of strategy and technology innovation for Deutsche Telekom, in a statement.

“Together with our partners, we have demonstrated fiber-like performance is also possible with wireless backhauling/X-Haul solutions,” Choi added.

Noted Per Narvinger, head of product area networks for Ericsson: “Microwave continues to be a key technology for mobile transport by supporting the capacity and latency requirements of 4G and future 5G networks. Our joint innovation project shows that higher capacity microwave backhaul will be an important enabler of high-quality mobile broadband services when 5G becomes a commercial reality.”

AirTies Wireless Networks has inked a retail-focused deal with Deutsche Telekom that will see the service provider sell a mesh-based, whole-home WiFi “Starter Kit” at its shops and online to residential customers in Germany.

Under the arrangement, Deutsche Telekom’s Starter Kit, with two AirTies 4920 extenders equipped with dual-band 802.11ac WiFi, for €199.95 (US$246.51), plus shipping. AirTies said its platform can be expanded to up to six extenders per mesh network.

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The retail agreement will give AirTies exposure to Deutsche Telekom’s customer base, which spans 28.5 million fixed-access lines, 18.5 million broadband lines, and 165 million mobile customers.

The agreement with DT follows a recent one with AT&T, and adds to other partnerships AirTies has with service providers such as Orange, Singtel, Sky, Swisscom, Comporium, Frontier Communications and Midco. 

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The global ambitions of the Reference Design Kit, the integrated software stack for set-tops being managed by three major MSOs, could get a big boost from a big telco in Germany.

Deutsche Telekom is monitoring the initiative and weighing whether it could complement its own efforts involving virtual set-top boxes and cloud-based user interfaces, CSI Magazine reported this week, citing DT exec Oliver Friedrich, who spoke at the CDN World Summit in London.

“RDK is a good example of how operators can push browser developments. We are definitely looking at it in the next weeks already,” Friedrich said, according to the report.

DT has not responded to requests for additional comments on its future plans involving the U.K. RDK LLC, the joint venture of Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Liberty Global that is managing the stack, declined to comment.  

Deutsche Telekom’s T-Labs unit has been working with ActiveVideo’s CloudTV platform to power field trials of a “virtual” set-top initiative. ActiveVideo, which has been touting the economics of set-top virtualization, recently joined the RDK club as a licensee, extending an application and service framework that could potentially ride on top of the RDK and give the platform a way to utilize a cloud-based browser.

More than 160 companies, including an array of set-top box makers, silicon vendors, and test and integration firms, have licensed the RDK. More than 15 pay-TV operators, including Comcast, Liberty Global, TWC, and Kabel Deutschland, are among those that have licensed the RDK.

But an operator doesn’t need to license the RDK directly in order to take advantage of the platform; they can also rely on a third party, such as a systems integrator or a set-top manufacturer to get access to it.

DT appears to be taking this partnership path to RDK, at least early on. In March, Cisco Systems announced that it had implemented an RDK-based IPTV system for a pilot project for DT subsidiary Hrvatski Telekom, the largest operator Croatia. At the time, Cisco touted it as the first RDK-based IPTV deployment and Europe’s first successful implementation of the RDK.

Dish Network investors continued to be unswayed by speculation chairman Charlie Ergen was making moves to acquire No. 4 wireless communications company T-Mobile, evidenced by its shares falling slightly in early trading Monday.

News that Ergen, who has been hoarding wireless spectrum for the past three years, has approached T-Mobile parent about a possible combination first surfaced on Friday (Sept. 5). Dish stock was up slightly that day – it closed at $66.44 per share, up 60 cents each or 1%. Dish shares were trading at $66.22 each in early trading Sept. 8, down 22 cents each or 0.3% per share.

T-Mobile stock saw an initial 6% bump in early trading on Friday, but the shares closed at $30.67 each, up 1.5%. T-Mobile stock was priced at $30.86 per share in early trading Sept.8, up 18 cents or 0.6%.

According to a Friday report in Bloomberg News, Ergen approached Deutsche Telekom and although he did not make a formal offer, said he was open to making one in the next several months.

The news comes after Sprint Corp. said it had abandoned the ideal of a T-Mobile combination amid fears that a deal would not pass the necessary regulatory hurdles. In July, French telecom carrier Iliad made a $15 billion offer for a 56% interest in T-Mobile that was rejected as too low. Iliad is reportedly talking to other potential partners for another T-Mobile bid.

Ergen’s interest in T-Mobile is no secret. While the No. 2 satellite company has amassed a swath of wireless spectrum valued at about $17 billion, Ergen has said he would only build out the network with a partner. Last month, the Dish chairman said Sprint’s decision to pass on a T-Mobile combination as increasing Dish’s “optionality,” but wouldn’t elaborate whether that would mean he would make an offer for the carrier.

In a research note Monday, Elevation LLC media analyst Steven Sweeney wrote that the prices of both stocks reflect investor sentiment that Ergen will likely wait until after the November AWS wireless spectrum auction to make an offer, if he makes one at all.

Although an anti-collusion deadline – which prohibits participants from discussing the auction – expires on Sept. 12, Sweeney does not anticipate a last-second deal before that date. Sweeney added that a  sweetened bid from Iliad – which is not participating in the AWS auction and therefore is not restricted by the anti-collusion rules – is “more likely than a bid from Dish because [Iliad] has a window to push to try and get a deal for [T-Mobile] done while Dish is temporarily unable to bid for [T-Mobile].”