We have saved you from the disclaimer sheet, but that's the back of the presentation. Just an overview of Aussie Broadband. We began in regional Victoria, delivering residential broadband in underserviced areas. The business grew initially using wireless technology and built a reputation for service, technology, transparency, and customer advocacy. Going alongside the NBN rollout, Aussie expanded its residential customer base, and we developed our service model, which holds true today. Aussie operates only onshore call centers and empowers its agents to solve customers' problems. Individual agents are not assessed based on call duration, but on their ability to solve customers' problems first time. Our scripting is minimal, aimed only at compliance elements. Aussie expanded incrementally into the business, enterprise, and government sectors, driven initially by residential customers wanting the Aussie Broadband experience at work.
We were impatient to grow in these areas, and in 2022, Aussie Broadband acquired Over the Wire, gaining a tier one voice network, regulated call termination revenue, and a heightened ability to serve business, enterprise, and government clients. The 2024 acquisition of Symbio added the region's largest mobile virtual network enabler, or MVNE, a second tier one voice network and telco-as-a-service capabilities. Symbio's customers include multinational over-the-top providers such as Zoom, RingCentral, and 8x8. With these acquisitions, Aussie Broadband has transformed into a diversified group known for disrupting the Australian telco market. Our innovations include proprietary software such as the My Aussie app, the CarbonSaaS service portal for enterprise clients and partners, and the upcoming Nitrogen wholesale platform. Since listing in October 2020, Aussie has compound annual growth in its revenue of 36%, growing to almost $1.2 billion in FY25.
Underlying EBITDA over the same period has a CAGR of 64%. As you can see, FY23 saw a step change in both gross margins and EBITDA margins as the completion of our core fibre network replaced the majority of our leased backhaul links. The EBITDA margin of 11.6% in FY25 was a slight decline on prior year due to the impact of the $10 million net investment in Buddy, our new value-focused brand. If you exclude that, the EBITDA margin continued its improvement trajectory. FY25 also saw a large focus on productivity improvements following the loss of a significant contract. Material improvements in our staffing ratios were created in FY25, and we believe we can do better yet. On the right, you can see our revenue and gross profit by segment and product.
Residential continues to be the engine room of the business, with 57% of total revenue and nearly 50% of total gross profit. Our ambition is to continue to grow our organic share in residential, while organically growing at least equally fast in the other areas to maintain our revenue diversification. With Symbio now fully consolidated, the weighting of the higher margin products of Symbio and NetSit means voice now represents 29% of gross profit for the group. In terms of our relative market positioning as an NBN reseller, our share of the fixed broadband NBN market continued to grow, up 1.1 percentage points to 8.4%. At the time of our IPO, this market share was 4%. In FY25, our total broadband connections across the group grew to 788,000, up 104,000 from the year prior, representing 15% growth.
We also saw some strong momentum in mobile, with services growing across the group to 216,000, up by 35,000 or 19%. Our owned Aussie Fibre network grew to almost 2,000 kilometers, with 896 connected buildings and opening up more than 2,600 near-net buildings in our immediate footprint. With this network, we were able to bypass the NBN and directly service businesses at significantly higher margins. Our connections per building for Aussie Fibre is at 1.2 connections, and growing that ratio represents a significant opportunity for us. We're already seeing modest improvements in the ratio. We have around 8.2 million numbers hosted across our Symbio and NetSit tier one voice net platforms, and a total of 8.7 billion call minutes across our domestic networks. Lastly, but just as importantly, we were nominated by Roy Morgan as Australia's most trusted telco for the fourth consecutive year.
We'll now touch on some of the highlights for FY25 and the results we released last week. Aussie Broadband delivered robust financial results in FY25, with revenue up 18.7% to $1.187 billion, driven by strong gains in residential and solid growth in enterprise and government following major customer wins. Underlying EBITDA at the top end of upgraded guidance reached $138.2 million, up 14.7% on the prior year. It's worth noting that Symbio contributed significantly in its first full year in the group, adding $39.4 million to EBITDA and achieving 35% growth on a pro forma basis, which included $6 million in synergies that exceeded expectations for the year. Symbio is a cornerstone for our future wholesale growth. Operating cash flow before interest and tax was $117.3 million, down 8.5% on the prior year. Our cash conversion, however, improved to 84.9% from 74.9% in H1.
Our FY2025 cash flow was impacted by working capital timing differences and payments related to the employee share trust. Overall, our current and future underlying cash flow and cash conversion remain strong. Underlying NPATA rose 6.5% to $55.8 million. EPS was down by $0.003 to $0.19, noting here that the weighted average number of shares has been influenced by several changes over the course of the two years. Our goal is to deliver at least 20% annual growth in EPS going forward. During the year, we declared a $0.016 interim ordinary dividend and a $0.024 special dividend, and following year end, we also declared an ordinary dividend of $0.024 per share. Total dividend paid for FY2025 was $0.064, and all were fully franked. We also have a share buyback open and have purchased 3.1% of the company's equity to date.
Telco is a dynamic sector, and I thought it might be useful to give some context for the telco world in which our strategy was developed. In the NBN market, challenger brands have continued to take market share after larger incumbents. The top four providers' share has fallen from 91% to 78% in the last four years. Despite more than 130 RSPs operating in Australia, challengers are still underrepresented compared to global markets. As a pioneer challenger, Aussie Broadband leads the way as the largest of the challengers, but also the leader in high speed, with more than 56% of our connections on speeds of 100 megabits or higher. This positions us well for the upcoming September rollout of NBN's new high speed tiers. In case you weren't aware, on the 14th of September, NBN is upgrading its speed tiers.
Customers on 120 links using fiber to the premises or HFC technologies will get an automatic upgrade to 550, while 250/25 will upgrade to 750/50. Those customers on gigabit plans will experience a doubling of their upload to 100, and the new multi-gigabit products will also be available. Approximately 22% of all NBN connections will be upgraded. This is 35% for Aussie Broadband customers. An additional 18% of all NBN connections are on FTTP or HFC with a 50 megabit product and are eligible for 10 times more speed for a relatively modest price differential. Additionally, NBN's Fibre Connect program also encourages residential customers to migrate to full fiber from legacy copper connections and to take advantage of the high speed future. Currently, 58% of NBN connections are on non-full fiber connections and on speeds less than 100 megabits, and as such, this represents a significant opportunity for us.
The new NBN wholesale arrangements, which became effective in November 2023, also introduced annual wholesale price increases for the first time. This has introduced a new dynamic into the telco environment and creates further churn opportunities for challengers like Aussie Broadband to capitalize on. Challengers are growing in the mobile space too. Mobile virtual network operators who resell Telstra, Optus, and Vodafone services are still underrepresented in Australia compared to global comparators, showcasing the potential for disruption locally. We're also well placed in the $2 billion wholesale voice market. The Symbio acquisition added a second tier one voice network to the business's assets, along with additional growth, capacity, and advanced enablement platforms to support growth telcos across data and voice. Across all segments and the Australian landscape, you can see the opportunities ahead for Aussie Broadband to capture, and I'll touch briefly on enterprise and government on the next slide.
Over the last year, the team has onboarded key enterprise and government customers, major household names like Bunnings, Westpac, the Reject Shop, and institutions such as Queensland Fire, Queensland Police, and more. They all now rely on Aussie Broadband for their connectivity needs. We also became the official telecommunications partner of Cricket Australia for the next three years, with the partnership focusing both on technology upgrades and community initiatives. We're adding new logos every month, and last week we announced a strategic five-year partnership to deliver enterprise-grade voice and high-speed internet services to ACOR's extensive portfolio of hotels across Australia. I'll now touch on the opportunities we see ahead for Aussie Broadband. In FY25, Aussie Broadband launched our three-year Look to 28 strategy with a continued focus on growth and customer service, and ultimately to become the telco people love.
We set out our organic ambitions to grow revenue beyond $1.6 billion, and with an NBN market share of more than 11%. It's worth noting that these ambitions were organic in nature and did not include significant wholesale contract wins, such as the one I will discuss shortly. We will consider refreshing these ambitions at the half year. To support this growth, I restructured the business into three segments, each headed by a Group Executive with responsibility for the end-to-end customer experience, with a focus on removing customer friction points and further improving our product and service offering. Our previous structure was a functional model, and the new structure creates a higher degree of accountability for each segment's financial performance. We've started strongly in the first year of this strategic period, announcing an exclusive six-year wholesale services agreement with CBI-backed challenger brands More and Tangerine.
At the same time, Aussie sold its sub-brand Buddy to Tangerine. The new agreement will integrate More and Tangerine's existing 250,000 connections into the Aussie network, while supporting both companies' future growth ambitions. This will increase Aussie's on-net connections to over 1 million. The arrangements will not materially impact FY26, but will add $12 million to underlying EBITDA before amortization of contract incentives starting in FY27. Finally, I just wanted to leave you with some key takeaways. Aussie Broadband has a rich history and track record of organic and inorganic growth, and we're well positioned to maintain that with guidance of 14% to 21% underlying EBITDA growth for FY26. We will continue to expand our residential business in the new high-speed world and leverage our strong pipeline of customers in the business, ENG, and wholesale segments.
Aussie has also declared a final fully franked dividend of $0.024, and our open share buyback program is continuing until this November. We have a strong balance sheet with ample gearing capacity to fund organic growth and indeed organic and inorganic growth, where opportunities exist to add value through M&A. That was a whistle-stop tour through Aussie Broadband. A year-end investor pack is available on the ASX platform and has more detail. Thank you for your time, and I look forward to taking a few questions, but if you have any afterwards, please use the email address on the screen.
Thank you, Brian. Great insight through Adrian and yes, very, very good. We've put two telcos close together for this presentation today. Actually, not surprisingly, this question around that knowledge came in a little later, but who would be your closest, who do you benchmark yourself against? Who would be your closest competitor or you compare yourself with?
As I touched on before, we are the most trusted telco in the industry, but telco itself is the least trusted, one of the least trusted industries. What we like to do is benchmark ourselves against other brands. I think we're the 32nd most trusted brand across the board, and we'd like to get higher up that list. That's probably our more immediate comparison. In terms of telcos, we do like to think we do things a bit differently, and we're sort of more about setting standards than following them.
Okay, great. You mentioned that the largest proportion of your business is from retail, making inroads into business, commercial, and government. What are the opportunities you really see there for increasing the share that you have of business and commercial in?
Yeah, we've been talking about the ENG growth, particularly for the last few years with our shareholders, and we did say it would take multiple periods for it to sort of start to land. The ENG revenue grew by 11% this year, which is the start of that. Because there's very long sales cycles in the ENG space, it can take up to a year to complete from prospect to sale, and then further some of the six months from sale to provisioning. It takes a while for that to flow through. We're continuing to invest in our business development team, and we're hopeful of continued double-digit growth into the future.
Another question in that context, you showed some logos of businesses that you'd recently gained, and one of which was Westpac, among others. The question is, big banks like Westpac or big operations organizations such as Westpac that are very electronically focused, how do you help them? What is it, just telephones or is it more than that?
Our first sale is generally a data lead, so we're connectivity. We're bringing what we call nbn® tails into their branch network, particularly within Westpac. We try and also sell other services to them, such as the degree of managed network, voice calls, mobiles even. We've got a portal I touched on there with CarbonSaaS, which enables the IT department of Westpac to self-serve and spin connections up within minutes, which when it used to take months in previous lives.
Okay. There are a number of these questions for Michael in the last presentation, so I'll ask them to you. AI, it's only come up several times this morning so far. How do you see that in improving your customer experience or to make your business more efficient?
Yeah, we're in the early stages of our AI journey, but part of the initial focus is just the governance model and making sure, particularly in relation to customers, that we're able to use information that is reliable and can be trusted. What we're doing internally is we're actually creating a data set from our escalation teams. We've got a team of Aussie experts, as we call them, and the escalation points for more tricky technical issues. We're trying to document all their knowledge into a knowledge bank that can be presented to the first person answering the call quickly, so they can answer questions more quickly and they don't have to escalate. The customer doesn't have to be on hold, but we can deliver the solution much more quickly. We've got some ideas as to how we can enhance that even further over time.
You're helping Cricket Australia in the same regard?
Yeah, not so much in that because that's an ENG customer, so that's less telephonic support, it's more personal support.
Okay, thank you. Brian, we're right on time. There's a couple of questions, as I say, we'll get those across to you a little later this afternoon, but thank you so much for being part of ASX CA Connect this morning.
Thanks very much.