One thing that you don’t tend to hear about on the big commercial review sites is what happens with a product in the medium to long term. That’s one thing that a small independent site like this can bring to you all. Unfortunately I have to report one such failure today as my Sitecom WL-308 router failed yesterday after 10 months of reliable operation.

Introduction

The Sitecom WL-308 router is aimed at the enthusiast/gamer and is given the gaming router tag to help it sell into this market. Hopefully you’ll have read my review of it already but if you haven’t you can find it here – Sitecom WL-308 Review or by searching the site with the keyword ‘Sitecom’.

If you read the review you’ll find that it’s a product that I like and in fact I went ahead and awarded it 9/10 which is a very good score. For the moment I’ll leave the score as 9/10 and not make any further remarks about it having poor reliability or anything like that as this might be a one off for Sitecom – who knows…

The Fault

The router has been running almost non-stop for 10 months and generally it is left on. When I came home from work yesterday my PC reported that it was not connected to the network (it connects via a LAN cable – others connect via WLAN). So I immediately looked at the router and found that none of the ethernet cable connection LEDs were lit (LAN and cable modem connections). Also the power LED was very faint and pulsing slightly, certainly not as bright as expected.

I disconnected it and waited for a few minutes and then reconnected but without any further success. It looks to me like the internal power supply/regulation circuitry may have failed.

Looks like I’ll have to rely on my old Linksys 802.11b router for the time being, which is currently in place and working fine.

Returns Progress

So I immediately contacted Sitecom’s support department via the web form on their website. I got a response within 48hrs which is pretty good and certainly much better than some manufacturers so that bodes well for anyone who has one of these and wants to return an item under Sitecom’s 10 yr warranty. Fortunately for myself though the product is less than 1 yr old so mine will be returned to Scan from where I bought it.

This has the added advantage that I’ll be able to test out Scan’s returns system and see if it lives up to the high standard that I’ve experienced from ebuyer when I had to return a Samsung monitor. So tonight I have am about to send off my details to scan via their web form and I’ll keep you all posted on the progress by updating this post.

Scan Returns update

Well, it’s a mixed bag to report back really. The returns process is quite easy to understand, a mixture of on-line web forms, logins and emails allow you to give information and keep up to date with the progress.

Unfortunately on receiving the replacement router I immediately realised that they had actually sent an incorrect replacement. I had received a bottom of the range Sitecom WL-340 instead opf the top of the range WL-308 that had failed. Once I notified them they apologised for the mistake and arranged to have the incorrect one picked up and a proper replacement sent out.

Overall the process took quite a long time to complete, lengthened of course by their mistake. Fortunately for me we have someone at home to receive parcels most of the time but for many people this could be a costly and time consuming procedure as they might have to visit the city-link depot that serves their area (twice or three times if errors are made) and mine for example is 38 miles (~50 mins drive) from my home.

Having also returned items to ebuyer I would certainly say that their RMA process is easier and quicker.

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