I cannot see the pain subsiding for long term investors of...

I cannot see the pain subsiding for long term investors of Telstra any time soon. I you look at Telstra as a company and the market conditions of when it was at its all time high it was basically a government backed monopoly that owned almost every phone line in Australia. Any person or business that wanted to connect to the internet had to pay Telstra a fee.

There are 2 Major driving factors that has doomed Telstra. Mobile Phones and NBN.

NBN now owns all the physical infrastructure for the internet, Telstra has lost its monopoly and a level playing field has been created for all of its competitors. in the early internet days if you went with a "smaller" ISP back then like TPG or Iinet you often still had to have an active Telstra phone line even if you didn't use the phone. Now even Telstra has to pay NBN to sell an internet service to someone, and the profit margins are terrible.

The early days of mobile phones were not too much of an issue for Telstra as most people still connected to the internet via a landline as Data was slow and expensive! Mobile phones also opened up a new revenue stream for Telstra. If you look at today however mobile phones have also taken away Telstra's monopoly, Firstly Optus has created its own powerhouse mobile phone network and unlike the old days of phone lines you are not tied to 1 service provider. Vodaphone is also a competitor and it looks like TPG will be one soon too. They are all eating away at Telstra's market share which is why Telstra has been forced to recently drop prices. Yes Telstra does still have a monopoly in regional areas however this is not profitable and Telstra runs these as a loss with Government assistance. There was battle recently with TPG trying to access the regional towers as they are partly government funded.

The other thing the modern mobile phone network has done is opened up the playing field even more so for access to the internet. A lot of people do not have a wired connection to the internet and only access it through their mobile phone with a large data plan. As described before in Urban area's it is pretty much a level playing field and comes down to price with companies like Optus offering a lot more Data for a lot less.

5G

There is alot of people saying that the 5G network is going to save Telstra and return them back to the glory days. This is the dumbest thing i have ever heard. 5G is simply an upgrade over the 4G network, Telstra does not own the 5G network, not only is it going to take years to properly roll out. 4G still has coverage gaps. But competitors such as Optus ect.. will have their own 5G network. It will be the same situation as it is now, customers will pick a product based on Price/Performance/Value (Data).

I think a lot of ISP's are using 5G as a way to move away from paying NBN ridiculous fees and sell huge data bundles that can be used at home too. This does benefit Telstra however it is exactly the same for its competitors.

The final major fundamental flaw of Telstra is its cost of operation. Being an ex-government business Telstra still has an extremely large and inefficient workforce. It is currently paying out massive redundancy packages to try and reduce this however this will still take many years. If you look at competitors such as TPG who use a mostly offshore workforce and only having to rely on local contractors, which have next to no benefits of a full time employee that has been working for a company for 30+ years. You can see why TPG's cost of operation is so much lower.

I would compare Telstra to the likes of any once great business, a most recent example being Apple. Apple invented the modern smartphone and road that gravy train for many years, however know that the competition (and there is a lot of it) have either caught up or over taken Apple how can they continue to grow? they simple can't. Apple will either have to compete on price or invent the next big thing. You can't simple keep selling the same product and charging more money for it.

I do think Telstra offers the best service however this does not make them the most profitable company. I am not trying to down ramp Telstra in any way however i think there are a lot of people our there that do not fully understand the market conditions that Telstra is facing and why the share price has been dropping for so long.