It seems that Peplink products do not have a very long life span and to complicate product issues, Peplink refuses to help and simply replies with “Replace the device” in every case. Apparently Peplink does not offer an out of warranty repair option or even have a repair service. I have purchased 4 Balance 380’s and 580’s and so far 3 of the 4 have failed with issues that could be resolved such as a bad ROM flash card, or in another case the LCD showing all squares when I am able to connect to the device via the console. Lets face it, the product is no better than the support behind it. These issues seem to be more frequent in the Balancer products. I have 18 Pepwave devices deployed and have never had an issue with any of them but I see now that if I do ever have an issue with them support is non-existent. It’s time to migrate over to Kemp and Ubiquiti for support and reliability reasons. This one outage has cost us more in lost productivity then it will cost to replace all of these Peplink devices with more reliable solutions. I have been a Peplink customer since 2010 have purchased 22 devices and Peplink is going to run me off with a lack of product support and support offerings.
How are you expecting support when you are not prolonging your support after the included 1 year? If you are looking into enterprise level equipment, you cannot expect support ‘for free’, that’s just not how the world works.
We’ve been using Peplink since 2016 and have deployed hundreds of Peplinks, from Balance and MAX series, we’ve had only two die over the years, never had issues with getting a replacement or repair when I had an issue that needed support to fix.
We recently needed to replace some Peplinks that were already over 5 years old and were just too slow for the current needs, but they didn’t get any defects. For us the licenses we pay yearly is also for the other features it brings, like inControl2 which is essential to our business use. We don’t have any 380/580 models though, so not sure if there are some specific hardware revisions that had issues, so you should contact your distributor.
If you are thinking of switching to Ubiquiti, good luck, as their support is non existent and their firmwares are beta at best. Especially if you are out of warranty, which you can’t even prolong after the default they offer. Their balancing/failover features are in no way comparable to what Peplink offers.
I offered to pay for repairs and my offer was refused. I don’t expect anything for free. I also do not write the checks so extending the warranty is not my choice. I know that I can replace a Ubiquiti device every year and still com out cheaper than what Peplink charges for products and maintenance. In fact, because the pricing is so much better, I can keep Ubiquiti spares on the shelf and still be cheaper. Now when it comes to performance, there is no arguing about the fact the Ubiquiti far out-performs Peplink. Also, Ubiquiti’s warranty is 2 years and Peplink’s is a 1 year warranty. But if you make good hardware, providing a 2 year warranty is no a problem.
None of the enterprise vendors we work with have an out of warranty service for hardware defects. I can understand how they don’t provide this service as it’s very uncommon in the enterprise space. It is something we took into consideration when we went the Peplink route and we knew that for our use case we needed to have active support on them anyway so we took that into account of our budgets and into our offerings for customers.
Your distributor could also help with reactivating a warranty after it’s lapsed, but Peplink will need a device report you can export from a running machine to be able to allow the reactivation of the warranty. This is very common with all enterprise vendors we’ve worked with.
If you don’t want that kind of service model, Peplink (and many others) are not for you. We are happy with the kind of service Peplink offers us and our customers, as long as you have an active care plan.
That is how most enterprise vendors work. Cisco, Juniper, Aruba etc… they do not offer repair options for out of warranty devices