"Following the green light by the treasury to proceed with the arrangement, the working committee is still putting together the policy-building blocks and commercial nuts and bolts of the proposed LTE network," said Nzioka Waita, corporate communications director at Safaricom.

Kenya had options to either do a spectrum auction or award the project to the company most likely to deploy the network, based on financial muscle, but Ndemo said the public-private partnership was the most attractive.

Analysts have hailed Kenya's decision to opt for a public-private partnership model, which is expected to give an opportunity to smaller ISPs and content providers who may not have the financial muscle demonstrated by mobile network operators.

"At the core, this is really mostly about infrastructure sharing but motivated by the need to share scare resources (i.e. spectrum) and at the same time allow open access for operators of different maturity and financial capability," said Francis Hook, IDC East Africa manager. "No single operator can invest in 4G rollouts and expect to re-coup investments quickly without engaging in anticompetitive practices like charging high rates for other operators to use the 4G infrastructure."

Mobile network operators like Safaricom, Airtel and Orange, which have undertaken 3G rollouts, were initially skeptical about 4G because they had not recouped costs of 3G networks.