Openserve’s stabilisation path is well underway in turning around several years of revenue declines. As part of our transformation journey, Openserve’s overall revenue mix evolved into next-generation-led products and services, which now represent more than half of our revenue base. Openserve continues to focus on future growth areas and has seen a sustained uptake in high-capacity links and an increase in demand for fibre services across both the carrier and consumer segments. However, the impact of the post-pandemic recovery is still evident in the challenging performance in our small and medium businesses. To improve our service delivery, Openserve enhanced customer engagements and accelerated digitisation during the year.
Key strategic focus areas
Revenue declined marginally by 0.4% to R13 428 million, underpinned by growth in data and offset by the decline in the legacy business. The performance also reflects the impact of the post-pandemic recovery. This is still evident in the challenging performance in the small and medium businesses. Although overall revenue was flat, Openserve’s revenue from external customers increased by 2.8%.
Fixed-data revenue increased by 5.5% due to an increasing demand for high-speed fibre broadband connectivity of 30.8% and growth of 13.1% in carrier links. The decline of legacy fixed business remains in line with management’s expectations, with fixed voice revenue reducing 9.4% year on year.
EBITDA of R4 163 million with an EBITDA margin of 31% was sustained. This was supported by efficiencies extracted from maintaining a modernised network and decommissioning legacy infrastructure.
Scalable networkOpenserve invested capex of R3 472 million in modernising and expanding our network during the year. This enabled a flexible, modular and scalable network architecture that has ensured Openserve delivers high-speed and increased capacity networks across South Africa, reflected in the increased fixed-data consumption of 16.6% across our network.
As we continue to invest in our robust infrastructure network, we aggressively improved our footprint in the year under review by increasing the number of homes passed with fibre by 52.7% to 839 691. Furthermore, we continue to upgrade existing fibre nodes, allowing us to use our strategic network investments to provide network coverage to additional premises including residential, enterprise and carrier base stations.
During the unrest experienced in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng in July 2021, our access network suffered multiple breaks. However, we did not lose any traffic on our core network due to our capability to use auto reroute restoration in case of fibre breaks in the network.
Commercialise the networkDuring this year we saw the highest increase in the number of homes connected with fibre, resulting in a growth of 38.4% to 389 109 homes connected to our network. This represents a leading connectivity rate of 46.3%, driving our connect-led strategy of connecting premises with fibre. This increased demand for fixed connectivity increased our fixed customer base in the second half of the year. We are confident that this trend will continue as more customers turn to stable high-speed fibre connectivity for their increased consumption needs. Similarly, we saw an increase in carrier backhaul requirements resulting in a growth of 7.4% in carrier links providing high-capacity connectivity to base stations.
In driving innovative solutions aimed at enabling multi-use of our fibre infrastructure, we launched Web Connect and Uni Connect, which are cost-efficient products focused on serving the connectivity requirements of residential and enterprise customers, respectively. We further enhanced our broadband product portfolio with the introduction of the 500 Mbps product expanding our speed offerings to the market. The attractiveness of such value propositions enabled the activation of more than 490 400 services, including broadband and other value-added services such as voice over internet protocol, intercom and security.
Aligned to our customer first strategy, we have aggressively rolled out fibre to improve the experience of our customers across our network, focusing on areas impacted by repeated copper theft. We improved our installation time of new-generation broadband by 12.5%, and the robust restoration capability resulted in an availability index of 99.9%, 99.7% and 99.9% across our access, aggregation and core network layers, respectively.
Our digital and innovation team continues to improve the digitising of our applications and automation processes to improve the experience of our customers using the Openserve Connect app. We have also enhanced our digital customer support by establishing the Digital Experience Centre and the recently launched Openserve Marketing tool. This tool is the first phase of our Unified Partner Platform allowing ISPs to easily promote and manage their deals on Openserve’s digital platforms. Such initiatives have reshaped our interactions with our customers, resulting in an NPS improvement of 5.9%.
Inherent to the key strategic imperatives, employee development and wellbeing remains a focal point in our transformation journey. This is evident through the recent successes of being awarded first place at the SA Reward Association for the Openserve Heroes Programme and the recognition of Openserve by LinkedIn for being one of the top 25 best workplaces to grow your career in South Africa in 2022.
Investing in modernising the network where required, Openserve successfully tested and deployed XGS-PON with the ability to deliver symmetrical speeds of up to 10G. This will augment Openserve’s current FTTx architecture, allowing it to provide higher bandwidth and low latency services to consumers, enterprises and future 5G requirements, aligning with Openserve's strategy to continuously lead, innovate and unlock the potential of our network by extending our services to our clients and improve Openserve’s network capabilities.
Openserve is positioned to provide state-of-the-art managed service capabilities as we partner with Google to land our Equinox cable in South Africa. Openserve will have access to a new submarine system offering connectivity to Europe, providing additional diversity for international communications, which should lead to improved customer service levels for international access, services and products. This positions Openserve to utilise our extensive network to provide network edge solutions to hyperscalers and other content, gaming and cloud providers who seek to leverage their scalable network.
As part of the larger digital transformation journey focused towards enabling comprehensive self-service capabilities across fulfilment, assurance and billing to all our customers, Openserve will continue to drive efficiencies across our network footprint, re-engineer our processes and expand our digital platforms to provide a distinctive customer experience with competitive and innovative products as part of our value propositions to all market segments.
As we continue to provide for increased consumption demands by focusing on capital investments to connect the access layer, our strategy to redefine the data connectivity market in South Africa will in parallel drive our future aspirations of serving our customers through a pervasive and high-quality network