Kenya's Telecom Licensing Race Is Now a Fight Over Infrastructure

Kenya's operator competition used to be measured in retail terms: SIM cards, data bundles, home fibre promotions with a free router thrown in. In 2026 the contest has moved a layer down, to who owns the towers, fibre routes and data centres that everyone else has to rent. Airtel Kenya's latest filing at the Communications Authority makes that shift hard to miss, and it is open for public comment right now.

What Airtel actually applied for

Airtel Kenya has asked the Communications Authority of Kenya for two authorisations: a Network Facilities Provider Tier 1 (NFP-T1) licence and an International Gateway Systems and Services (IGSS) authorisation. The regulator has published both applications for public input, with submissions open until 28 September 2026 before it decides. Each licence runs for a minimum of 15 years, with a 25-year option, under Kenya's Unified Licensing Framework.

NFP-T1 is the broadest infrastructure category the framework offers. It covers building and running national-scale network facilities — base stations, transmission towers, fibre-optic cabling, microwave links, satellite ground equipment and data centres — and, critically, it lets the holder lease that capacity to other operators. IGSS covers operating the gateways that carry international voice, data and internet traffic in and out of Kenya, so a licensee can route its own cross-border traffic instead of buying that path from a rival. Airtel has signalled it wants the international piece partly to support satellite services, including bringing Starlink Direct-to-Cell connectivity to Kenya.

Why this is about control, not just coverage

Kenya's passive infrastructure market is concentrated. Reporting on the sector puts Safaricom at roughly 59 percent of tower infrastructure and American Tower Corporation at about a third, which leaves challengers renting rather than owning the ground their networks stand on. Airtel has been closing the retail gap — its mobile subscription share has climbed from around 27 percent at the end of the last decade to nearly 30 percent — but retail share is fragile when the market leader also controls the steel and fibre underneath you.

Safaricom received a fresh 25-year operating licence in May 2026 under the same Unified Licensing Framework. Airtel said in August it had secured its own 25-year term, and the Authority's subsequent public-comment notice shows the facilities and gateway components still working through the formal process. Kenya has also spent this year tightening the licensing rules around data-centre operators. Taken together, it is a deliberate redrawing of who is licensed to own what.

What it means for smaller ISPs

For the many regional wireless ISPs, fibre resellers and hotspot operators serving Kenyan estates and market centres, none of this changes the day-to-day. But the direction is favourable. More licensed national facilities providers means more competition in the wholesale layer that a small ISP buys rather than builds: transit, leased fibre, tower space, and colocation in a data centre. Kenya's fixed broadband base passed 2.1 million subscriptions in 2025, split across fibre-to-the-home and fixed wireless, and a large share of that growth is happening below the level of the big operators.

The catch is that cheaper upstream capacity does not win customers on its own. When several operators can reach the same building, the differentiator is how the business runs: whether a new subscriber is provisioned in minutes, whether payments reconcile without someone matching M-Pesa messages by hand, and whether a lapsed account is disconnected and a settled one restored without an engineer logging into a router at midnight.

Where XpressRADIUS fits

That operational layer is what XpressRADIUS is built for. It brings PPPoE and hotspot billing into one system, with real-time RADIUS control over MikroTik routers, so provisioning, disconnection and reconnection follow payment automatically. M-Pesa and Kopo Kopo integration means mobile-money payments reconcile against subscriber accounts on their own, and multi-currency support covers operators working across more than one market. Whoever wins Kenya's infrastructure licensing race, the ISPs that grow through it will be the ones whose billing and enforcement keep pace with their subscriber numbers.

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