  The flat-rank of a totally disconnected, locally compact group G is an
integer, which is an invariant of G as a topological group. We generalize the
concept of hyperbolic groups to the topological context and show that a totally
disconnected, locally compact, hyperbolic group has flat-rank at most 1. It
follows that the simple totally disconnected locally compact groups constructed
by Paulin and Haglund have flat-rank at most 1.
