SPA504g phones have lost their backlights

[William Paulsen]

The LCD backlights on all our SPA504g phone have faded, compared to when they were new.  The fading actually occurred in their first few weeks of use, but I now notice this is annoying and people are complaining.  Do backlights of warranty replacements also fade?  Or did I simply get a bad batch?  (And yes, the phones' backlight settings are set to turn on.)

[stpaulalex]

This is a rather serious issue, since it is difficult to view the screen without the backlight.  I've had a 504 and 508 for a couple months now, and haven't seen this issue.  Based upon their performance, I recently purchased and deployed two-dozen of these phones in a brand new phone system.  To reiterate wrpaulsen's question, is this covered under the standard warranty?

[Steven DiStefano]

I have a SPA540 with a 500S sidecar active the same way I think.  The backlight is more dim than some others.

Have you tried calling SBSC for product warranty status and possible RMA?

Steve

[Alberto Montilla]

Dear Sirs,

If backlight is gone or nearly gone, this is covered under warranty, so please open a case with the SBSC for an RMA.

Regards
Alberto

[William Paulsen]

OK, I can return all the phones at my expens, but my real question is: Is the fading backlight problem fixed in the replacement phones???  Has anyone gotten a warranty replacement phone, and the backlight has NOT faded???

[stpaulalex]

How long ago did you buy these phones?

[William Paulsen]

Most were bought February 2010, so I guess I'm out of luck with any kind of warranty replacement.   A few were warranty replaced later in March because they died after a few  hours of use, so maybe I'll get to those.

But my question has still not been answered (or dismissed): Do replacement phones still havfe the same exact backlight fade?

Or maybe this is a feature, not a product defect, and I shouldn't bring it up here?

[Steven DiStefano]

I am trying to find the answer to your question and will need the phone team to respond.

But it's clearly not a feature we or you want

[Steven DiStefano]

I got some feedback from the phone HW team.

It’s a relatively uncommon hardware issue where some phones that have the backlight on maximum 24x7 will result in the backlight lighting becoming dimmer over time.

It is not very common and phones are replaced under RMA when/if customers run into the problem.

[William Paulsen]

We had the backlight set to go off after about 4 hours of idle, they were never on 24/7.  We hava 12 SPA-504g phone and the backlights failed on all of them within 2 weeks.

So if Cisco thinks this is uncommon and only occurs when they are on 24/7, then they don't yet understand the failure mode.  Any new replacement phones we might get under a warranty replacement will likely soon have the same problem.  Oh well, the staff will need to live with the dark phones.

[Steven DiStefano]

I appreciate you being professional and polite.   I will try to find out more, but at this point I am just Billy Joel.