We have hundreds of 411AR and 433AH RouterBoards that are all starting to fail after they have been operational for about 15months. After some investigation we saw that all devices that fail, have swolen 560uF capacitors as per the image below:
We further noticed that for the same models of these routerboards that we purchased in 2011, the problematic capacitors have been replaced with 680 uF capacitors.
We contacted Mikrotik support and were advised that the devices are no longer under warranty and therefore they are not prepared to repair them under RMA. Since this is cleary a design/manufacturing problem, I believe Mikrotik can do more than to simply make this our problem.
This problem is already costing us a fortune in terms of time and traveling costs that we need to spend to swop out these faulty boards and have also had a very negative impact on our services.
The “good news” is that if you replace these capacitors (faulty 560uF with new 680uF) the routerboard works prefectly again. Hopefully we do not see the same problem in 15 months from now with the 680uF capacitors.