Lee S Dryburgh

Lee S Dryburgh is a communications engineer, technologist and futurist. He pours great passion and energy into self-directed projects. He takes coffee and network bandwidth as input and outputs training, consulting and conferences.

His expertise is in two domains:

First - the way telecoms operates today at the engineering level; specifically Signalling System #7 (SS7/SigTran/CAMEL/MAP) which powers virtually all telephone calls, all SMS, cellular mobility itself, and most pre-paid cellular solutions.

Second - exceptional knowledge of the future of telecommunications, in particular telephony. He can provide a detailed view of the industry in 1, 2 or even 10 year’s time.

In his “youth” he spent years pouring over the 17,000+ pages which constitute the SS7/SigTran related specifications. Concurrently he worked across 30+ countries and 13 US States providing certification testing, training and consulting in SS7/SigTran matters for leading operators and vendors. By age 25 he was considered the world’s most knowledgeable SS7 expert and was the lead-author of the best SS7/SigTran book.

He then spent some years chasing hands on knowledge of what the industry said was next; working on engineering for the first 3G rollout, the first NGN, and the first mobile IMS network.

In his late 20s he began an engineering doctorate for Cisco looking at the future of telephony. He came to the conclusion that what the industry said was next, was wrong; and that the emergent opportunity space was enormous but frightfully complex. As a result established telecom conferences were largely irrelevant, so at the start of 2008 he setup his own - the Emerging Communications Conference & Awards (eComm). The event is now highly regarded and is seen as the world’s leading-edge communications event. It focuses on what’s next in telecom, mobile and Internet communications (http://eComm.ec).

At the end of 2009 he came to the conclusion that mobile augmented reality will become a social necessity when it becomes a conduit for augmenting communications. So at the start of 2010 he setup the world’s first commercial augmented reality conference (http://arconf.com).

To date he has shunned making any money from his conferences, instead opting to spend 10% of his time to earning a living, primarily thru consulting and training in SS7/SigTran. The other 90% he spends on projects which interest him such as conferences.

Lee is both interested in life and people; specifically topics such as purpose, what motivates people, peak performance and happiness. (he can be reached at lee.dryburgh at eComm.ec)