Tidder's Blog

Ok, so this was a week and a half long adventure… but I’m finally at the point where I can write about it!

THIS IS NOT A HOW-TO! This is just general information on what it took to make this happen. With your own brain-power you, too, can figure it out.
This is all proof of concept only as some of the steps here would be illegal to do in the US in real life.

Pre-reqs:
1. Has to be non-divested Alltel!
2. Having an “in” in Alltel (We have a business account manager who rocks)
3. Need to have a means of fixing the “stick” issue
with the Motorola Droid’s PPP username always reverting to “@vzw3g.com”. I’m waiting for permission to release the information, DO NOT ASK ME HOW, PERIOD.
4. QPST
5. CDMA Workshop (newest version, not the pirate copy of 2.7 floating around)
6. HW Virtual Serial Port
7. A phone that can be used to easily clone the droid temporarily
8. Alltel PRL

Note: This does not require the Motorola Droid to be rooted.

First of all, the PPP “stick” issue needs resolved. Once again, I will not be going through that here. Once that is done, you need your MEID on Alltel. This is where you NEED to know someone on the inside. If you are persistent enough, you can call their general customer service and find someone to do it. We lost a Droid this way however, a CSR flagged the MEID as not usable on Alltel’s network once they found out what we were trying to do. Once that’s done, here comes the fun part…

Before activating the Droid, the Droid needs cloned to your easy-clone phone, preferably an Alltel phone. This will allow you to retrieve your HA Shared Secret which you will need for EVDO (3g) service. For some reason the Droid does not retrieve this when activated. Without this step, data WILL STILL WORK! Just at 1x speeds instead of EVDO. Now, activate this phone, retrieve your HA SS (might require QXDM depending on the phone used) and save it for later. Restore this phone to it’s original settings and power it off.

Now, Motorola Droid. Put the Droid into FTM mode (hold T while powering on). Use HW Virtual Serial Port to give the Droid a com port. Use QPST to write the SID and PRL to the phone, as well as setting a few settings. HA Auth needs to be disabled. Now, go into the menu where you can write the HA Shared Secret, and paste in (hex) what you retrieved from the easy-clone phone. Write these settings to the phone and reboot. Activate just for fun and make sure you’re on the Alltel network.

Next, put the phone into FTM mode again, and fire up CDMA Workshop. This time, write the PPP, PAP, HDR, and HDR usernames and passwords. The PPP and PAP passwords are alltel. The HDR passwords are the phones pESN.

After all this, I had working EVDO on the Droid, and it’s great.