fibre, and they are hoping that along with Pay-TV, they'll also be able to sell you a direct connection to their phone network. In doing so they'll bypass Telstra's monopoly over the copper cable. Telstra has recognised this threat to its revenue core, and that's why it's responded by accelerating its own optic fibre roll-out. Both carriers recognise that there is a third potential revenue stream - loosely called 'broadband services', which they see as computer traffic ( ie the Internet and the like), except at much higher data transmission rates than are currently possible. No-one really knows how big this business will be. We do know that computer data is the fastest growing component of all telecommunications traffic, and has been for more than a decade. Faster transmission speeds may well accelerate this trend. If so, computer data may could become the major business of the phone companies within a few years, far outstripping voice calls. The stakes are high. That's the simple explanation of why Australia is about to become possibly the most fibre connected nation in the world. It's a nice neat story, an encapsulaton of the sort of reasoning which has led to Australia's rapid roll-out of fibre. The only problem is that the corporate consultants overlooked one very important implication. In The Next Big Thing, part 2 , we look at why telecommunications is about to become a commodity business, and how the days when Telco's could expect massive and automatic profits are coming to