Well looks like today it is going to be an overseas kind of a day. Softbank is buying Japan Telecom for $1.28 billion from Ripplewood Holdings, reports Bloomberg. This adds a potential 170,000 customers for its Yahoo Broadband service, even though the high-speed service is not making any profits right now. “What we know about Softbank is that they are an aggressive price cutter and that’s what we should expect as they move into the fixed-line business,” Kieran Calder, an analyst at CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets in Tokyo told Bloomberg. “The big driver of Yahoo’s and Softbank’s broadband business has been offering voice’ calls over the Internet.”

Elsewhere, Carlyle Group is looking to buy a stake in DDI, a wireless data services company in Japan, according to Bloomberg. The price is said to be $2 billion. Earlier Vodafone announced that it was going to increase its stake in its Vodafone KK subsidiary.

Japanese telecommunications shares surged as Carlyle joined Softbank Corp. and Vodafone Group Plc announcing plans this week to buy or increase stakes in the nation’s telephone networks. Tokyo-based KDDI needs funds to expand its newest high-speed network, which is winning share from bigger rival NTT DoCoMo Inc. in Japan’s $76 billion market for cellular phone services.