"To date the practice has been to divide the available spectrum into 'reasonable' chunks, normally 15MHz to 20MHz blocks; whilst this creates more infrastructure-based competition between 'owners' of spectrum and is sufficient for run-of-the-mill broadband applications, it does not provide sufficient spectrum to use LTE to its full potential like 100Mbps download speeds and backhaul purposes -- for that one would need more like 40MHz to 50MHz," said Dobek Pater, senior telecoms analyst at Africa Analysis, an ICT consultancy firm with operations in sub-Saharan Africa.

While the availability of spectrum and infrastructure is going to encourage more competition between players, Pater said, success is based on how the partnership will be run and whether operators will be allowed to choose where to go.