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IMEI tell what?

A

AndyHaf

Newbie
My carrier, having updated its network, says my phone will not work much longer. I tried to buy an appropriate phone from them but they are out of what I want and have no idea when it might be available again.

I can buy it elsewhere, from several sources. They say, the same phone from other sellers may not be compatible. They can only tell by checking the IMEI, which of course I can’t know until I buy the phone.

Is this marketing propaganda or real? Why would the phone manufacturers be making/selling phones “unlocked for all US carriers” that will only work for some? How likely is it that by buying a major brand, common model, phone I will end up with something unuseable?
 
Where are you looking to buy these phone from? Ebay? Are these used phones? Or brand new? If it's carrier unlocked and the carrier you want is compatible with the phone, I dint see a problem. What country are you in? In the US, we still have gsm and cdma and not all carriers support both. So it depends what radios, the phone has.
 
Please provide more details, you're leaving out a lot of pertinent info. What phone do you have? Which version of Android is it running? Which carrier?

Your phone's IMEI will be somewhere in the Settings menu. It might be buried in a submenu but its a fundamental aspect for any smartphone so the IMEI is there, you just need to take the time to look for it. Just looking at a couple of phones in front of me, on a OnePlus running 12, the IMEI is buried in the Settings >> About device >> Status menu. On a Moto running 7, its IMEI is buried in the Settings >> About phone >> Status >> IMEi information menu.

Regarding your phone becoming obsolete, that's a reality a lot people refuse to accept. Different carriers do gradually upgrade their cellular networks and their cellular services, so with some older, dated phones that might result in compatibility problems. There's a cellular radio chip inside your phone that has the ability to interact with a specified number of different bands/frequencies. That chip is soldered to the logic board, it's a fixed component. When a cellular upgrade involves a change in those previous bands/frequencies, your phone just becomes too dated to continue being used with that carrier's cellular network. It's a hardware issue that software can't fix.
 
I don’t mean to be harsh or demeaning but I have provided all the necessary information. Apparently no one who has so far read this has any idea of what information the IMEI is key to that is relevant to the question at hand. People are asking for information that is not relevant, that will simply cloud the issue further.

I will try to express it a little differently.
The carrier announced their new, improved network for 5G, accommodating both 4G and 5G, at a new, lower service price. Being that the cost is significantly less, I asked to be put on the new network plan. I was told,
“Great, let me check your phone compatibility. I need the IMEI.”
Notice this is not what brand, what model, or any other piece of information by which phones are sold. The answer came back, my phone, which they have been servicing for some time, is not compatible with the new system. The service person could not explain anything further about it but the implication is that a different physical phone of the same brand and model might work

Recently I was notified that I must upgrade soon. My service could be discontinued at any moment.

The carrier sells quite a few NEW phones. ALL are guaranteed to work on the new network. I have only a few personal requirements, one of which is cost since I am on a strictly limited fixed income. They sell a phone that meets all my requirements (for more than I would like to pay but within possibilities). When I tried to buy it:
out of stock, can’t say when it will be available. Can’t say how long my current phone will continue working.

I find that a few major retailers claim to have the phone in stock at near or exactly the same price.
The manufacturer and the model are the same as what the service provider sells. Nothing in the advertising or the specifications in any way suggests it might only work for some carriers (except the fact that it is manufactured only for GSM) The service provider says maybe one purchased from somewhere else will work, maybe it won’t. Only its IMEI can tell.

The obvious problem is that to get the IMEI I must first have the phone, i.e. I must first buy it. This seems irrational to me. Certainly I have no problem with the fact that there are hardware differences but I have great difficulty with the idea that compatibility differences, if they exist, would not be even vaguely suggested by the manufacturer or major retailers. It rather sound like the service provider is relying on something like random mutations that occur during manufacturing but get encoded in the IMEI number.

The question was, is this a real thing? It has no relevance to what carrier or what manufacturer, what model, or what specifications. It stands alone. Can I get stuck with a phone that is seemingly identical, by all information available to me, to those sold by the carrier, but will turn out to be a useless piece of junk?
 
AndyHaf said:
My carrier, having updated its network, says my phone will not work much longer. I tried to buy an appropriate phone from them but they are out of what I want and have no idea when it might be available again.

I can buy it elsewhere, from several sources. They say, the same phone from other sellers may not be compatible. They can only tell by checking the IMEI, which of course I can’t know until I buy the phone.

Is this marketing propaganda or real? Why would the phone manufacturers be making/selling phones “unlocked for all US carriers” that will only work for some? How likely is it that by buying a major brand, common model, phone I will end up with something unuseable?
Click to expand...

Probably can't assist you much, but from what I've read several times on AF, is that some US carrier networks, Verizon Wireless and MVNOs that use their network?, you can only use phones that they sell, or certain phone models and variants that they approve or white-list for BYOD activations. Like you might not be able to use phones imported from outside the US, sometimes described as "international". And I did read for one American carrier, you could only BYOD Apple iPhones or certain Samsung models. This could be why your carrier needs to know the IMEI.

Of course this is something I've never had to deal with myself as I'm not in America.
 
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ocnbrze said:
i don't get it. why not just buy it from your carrier. you will know then that it works with their network......and sorry if this seems irrelevant to you.
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I tried to buy from the carrier. Didn't I write that at least twice? They are out of stock until some unknown time. They say my service could be discontinued at any moment. I need to act soon. I don't want to spend money on some phone that is useful only to keep the account open; I want one that meets my needs.
 
mikedt said:
Probably can't assist you much, but from what I've read several times on AF, is that some US carrier networks, Verizon Wireless and MVNOs that use their network?, you can only use phones that they sell, or certain phone models and variants that they approve or white-list for BYOD activations. Like you might not be able to use phones imported from outside the US, sometimes described as "international". And did read for one American carrier, you could only BYOD Apple iPhones or certain Samsung models. This could be why your carrier needs to know the IMEI.

Of course this is something I've never had to deal with myself as I'm not in America.
Click to expand...
EXACT same phone as they sell (which they don't currently have in stock). They do not demand the phone come from them, lthey just say, for mysterious reasons, that the exact same phone from another retailer might not work on their network.. My current phone did not come from them, nor the one I had before the current one.
 
AndyHaf said:
EXACT same phone as they sell (which they don't currently have in stock). They do not demand the phone come from them, lthey just say, for mysterious reasons, that the exact same phone from another retailer might not work on their network.. My current phone did not come from them, nor the one I had before the current one.
Click to expand...

I'm thinking your carrier really should publish a list of phone makes, models and variants that you can activate and use on their network, and requiring the IMEI beforehand is bad. Maybe you need to change carrier to one who's more liberal?

My carrier (China Unicom) I can use pretty much any phone. I just insert the SIM and use it. Same for most carriers around the world, except for in the US apparently.
 
mikedt said:
I'm thinking your carrier really should publish a list of phone makes, models and variants that you can activate and use on their network, and requiring the IMEI beforehand is bad. Maybe you need to change carrier to one who's more liberal?

My carrier (China Unicom) I can use pretty much any phone. I just insert the SIM and use it. Same for most carriers around the world, except for in the US apparently.
Click to expand...
Their claim, whether true or not, is there is no phone identification information except the IMEI that can identify a phone that will work on their network. Some years ago I opened an account with a different carrier. They also ask me to provide the IMEI so they could find out if the phone I had would work on their network. There was no problem, it did, so I didn't pursue the issue further.

My finances are quite limited. This carrier, who sells Verizon time second hand, charges considerably less than Verison or any of the other big name carriers. What is particularly special is that not only is talk, text, and internet (data) unlimited for that price but it includes unlimited hotspot use. With most carriers one has to pay a much higher price, on top of the basic contract, to be able to use hotspot at all, and then it is often rather limited. There are very few internet access options in this very small isolated community and all the others are much more expensive.
 
The IMEI is just a phone identifier. It will tell them the exact model (not just something like "Galaxy s10" but which precise version), and it will tell them which country it was manufacturered for and which carrier, if any, it was sold through. That's it.

So why they insist on that we can only speculate about. Possibly with their being many different versions of some phones, and most customers not knowing that just the model name isn't enough, they decided that the simplest and least error-prone way to do this is to ask for the IMEI and then look the rest up. The person you are speaking to will probably be a low-level call center operative working from a script, so they will just have to do whatever company policy says for this. It's quite possible that the person who tells you that their IMEI lookup is the only way to know genuinely believes that, because it's the only way they have been told. But even if they know better, if their script says that is how to answer these questions then that will be the only answer they can give: calls may be monitored, and I doubt that deviations from the script are rewarded.
 
Most carriers are asking to confirm via the IMEI number now, the switch to VoLTE is a big part of this... mainly for the reason @Hadron mentioned.

AndyHaf said:
Why would the phone manufacturers be making/selling phones “unlocked for all US carriers” that will only work for some?
Click to expand...
If the phone says that, it should work 99% of the time. But carriers don't want to say "Phone Model 23" is compatible because there might be 5 different variants of that phone all called "Phone Model 23."
 
Maybe there's grounds for an antitrust lawsuit against this apparent US carrier cartel?

AFAIK no other country in the world has carriers that require an IMEI before you can use a phone on their networks.

This was the whole original premise of GSM mobile phones, was you could just insert the SIM in your own phone, and you were good to go. Which still holds true today, except in the US.
 
Of course most of the world standardised early on on GSM infrastructure, while the US deployed a mix of incompatible technologies. I suspect that some of the control freakery of some US carriers stems in part from that, e.g. the old CDMA carriers used to have to register the ID of every phone before it could connect to their network and so have a long culture of doing that even if these days with the (GSM-derived) LTE technology it is not necessary.
 
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