DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ICCID, IMSI AND IMEI

            Majority of the world population use and own a mobile phone. If one should compare the amount of people using mobile phone now and those using it like ten years ago,  You will realize that the number of mobile phone users have increased greatly and it is likely to increase more.
         About 60% of the world population use and own a mobile phone in the year 2014 and there is a forecast that the number of mobile phone users will reach 67% by the year 2019 which is about five billion individuals in numbers.
         Most mobile phones make use of a  little card which is inserted into it called a sim card. Sim stands for subscriber identity module and it consists of processor and storage. It is a very useful and important card that is used in Gsm networks.  
         Sim cards digitally contains ICCID, IMSI which this article will be discussing about shortly. There are four sizes of sim cards and they are
 Plug in
 Micro sim
 Nano sim
 M2m sim( machine to machine form factor 2).
The types of Gsm sim cards are
 2G sim cards which is just a sim
 3G sim cards which is a usim
 The multi application card which is used in most smartphones and has the sim and usim capabilities.

                     ICCID
ICCID stands for integrated circuit card identifier. It consists of 19 to 20 digits and it is always stored digitally on the card. It cannot be changed on a normal sim. ICCID can be used to determine the country which a sim card belongs and also the issuing service provider.

            STRUCTURE FOR ICCID
ICCID is grouped like this
 First two digits is known as industry Identifier
 Second two is the issuing country code
 Third two is the network identifier
 And the remaining numbers has no labels
An example of this can be found below
22       23         24          01234567890123

                         IMSI
IMSI Stands for international mobile subscriber identity. As the name implies, it is used to  know the identity of the subscriber. It consists of 15 digits and it is digitally stored on the sim card and cannot be changed on a normal sim.

               STRUCTURE FOR IMSI
IMSI is grouped like this
 First three digits is known as mobile country code
 Second two is known as mobile network code
 The remaining ten digits has no labels
An example of this can be found below
            234     80         1234567790

                        IMEI
IMEI stands for international mobile equipment identifier. The make and model of a phone can be derived from this number. In order to get the IMEI from a phone menu, all you have to do is dial (*#06#) and the number will be shown on the screen. This number is 15 digits in length and stored digitally on the handset.

              STRUCTURE FOR IMEI
IMEI is grouped like this
 First nine digits is known as the type allocation unit
 Second seven digits is known as the serial number
 The last digit is known as the check digit.
An example of this can be found below
012345678           0123456               4







Please read, share and comment