(ME)ID Required
First, the industry requires a way to let MEID phones work on old networks that use ESN. This is critical for manufacturers that will run out of ESNs before networks are ready to use MEID. The phones will be programmed with an MEID which they will use to generate a temporary ESN called pseudoESN (pESN). The problem is that the pESN will not be unique. There is a chance that more than one phone with the same pseudoESN is on the same network. There would be no way for the network to tell them apart. If this happens the 2 phones would probably get each other's SMS messages, at the least, or cancel out each others' service preventing both phones from working, in a worst case scenario. Engineers are working to minimize these problems before pESNs handsets are rolled out.
To genuinely solve this problem, the industry needs to come up with a way to recognize MEIDs on current networks. This effort is known as "MEID on CDMA2000". It consists of two parts. The first is getting handset manufacturers to comply with a little trick. In addition to ESNs, every handset has an additional set of codes that tell the network what the phone is capable of. One of those codes has previously gone unused and has always been set to "off". Manufacturers would set this code to "on" for all handsets with an MEID.
Base stations would then need to be upgraded to query phones entering a cell for this code, which they never cared about before. If a phone responded with the code "on", then the cell would address all traffic to the phone using MEID, if it was still "off," the cell would continue to use an ESN. This would assure that every phone on a network would have a unique identifier, and thus avoid mixing up transmissions (which the network types call data collisions).
MEID-equipped handsets will need to be able to generate a pseudoESN as well as comply with MEID for CDMA2000 in order to be compatible with CDMA networks for the foreseeable future.
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