 Note that to produce this form the MEID digits are treated as base 16 numbers even if all of them are in the range '0'–9'.Because the pESN is formed by a hash on the MEID there is the potential for hash collisions.These will cause an extremely rare condition known as a 'collision' on a pure ESN-only network as the ESN is used for the calculation of the Public Long Code Mask (PLCM) used for communication with the base-station.