Whitaker Associates is a consulting firm with expertise in a broad range of areas critical to success in the rapidly changing global economy. This expertise includes economic and financial analysis, strategy development, and implementation. Areas of industry expertise include telecommunications and transportation.

The telecommunications and transportation industries share a few key characteristics:

- both are capital intensive;

- both have been heavily regulated and were often government owned, though most telecommunications organizations has been privatized over the past few decades;

- both industries have provided infrastructure that has been critical to local functioning economies;

- both experience network effects such that the network becomes more valuable as more connections are established;

- both experience wide variations in demand during each day and over a year, which demands careful investment decisions that balance the benefits of a reasonable level of service (LOS) at peak periods against the fact that much of the network will be underutilized at other times;

- both benefit from robust economic forecasting models that reflect how user behavior changes in response to changes in price, quality, and other factors.

Much of the past decade we were involved in the structural transformation of domestic and European information services, and played a significant role in the explosive growth--from EUR 0 to EUR 500 M--of the competitive European voice information services industry. Whitaker Associates organized the leading independent industry congress, the European Directory Marketplace, and published the leading industry newsletter, THE OPERATOR, from 1990 through 2009.

Our work is with industries and organizations undergoing rapid change and development. We help providers, regulators, and consumers by delivering high-level, high-quality, and high integrity services.