Mystery yellow power LED on Hub 3

[bob8]

Cut a long story short, one of the LAN ports on a relative's late 2019 Hub 3 died on Saturday night during storm over SE London area.  The Hub 3 was set up in Modem mode for past 2 years, displaying purple/magenta power light. An external Asus router was wired to the now faulty LAN port.

On Sunday, when Virgin customer services advised us there was no outage and the hub appeared to be fine apart from lack of wifi, probably because the Hub was in modem mode (magenta power light).  We later factory reset the Hub3 to investigate.

The Hub 3 eventually booted up in regular wireless router mode. Quick test on ethernet and wifi seemed to suggest internet access was working. However the power light refused to change from solid yellow to bright white after multiple reboots.  It used to be 'white' colour back in 2019/2020 before switching to modem mode.

According to my physics, the colour white is made by combining Red, Green and Blue together, like a TV screen.

Yellow is made from combining Red and Green together.  Blue not required.

However, when the Hub 3 is in modem mode, the power light is magenta.

Magenta is made from combining Red and Blue together.

If Blue had failed, then the power light ought to have been displaying confusing Red colour in modem mode.

The speculation on this forum is the yellow power light is caused by faulty multi function LED does not seem to stack up in our case?

I have noticed the layout of the Hub 3 menu looks different to when I last logged into the hub back in early 2020.  Is it possible the yellow power light is simply a software bug?

The Hub 3 is now back in 'Modem mode' with magenta power light, with Asus router connected to one of the three remaining functioning LAN ports. Internet access seems to be fine, 6+ hours later.

Virgin also need to review and edit the web page:

https://www.virginmedia.com/help/broadband/virgin-media-wifi-not-working 

Description states White power light on and WiFi light is flashing green, but the graphic below description in above page clearly shows flashing GREEN power light and solid green WiFi light.

[Andrew-G]

The clearly yellow LED has previously been seen (a year or two back) in a spate of Yellow Light of Doom incidents that meant the hub was faulty and need replacing.  Since then we've seen few of those, but an intentionally yellow LED was introduced during a firmware change as indicating a wifi problem, although VM were never able to explain exactly what condition this was, and invariably told customers it was a problem with their devices.  This was originally indicated on the web site, and evidently they forgot to update it - not that the information offered was any practical use to customers.

The dirty brown/yellowy white, even light orange LED many Hub 3 users see is associated with degradation of the LED package (can be confirmed because  the hub then shows a red rather than magenta LED in modem mode) but as you rightly reason that's not the case for you, or anybody else seeing a bright yellow.  

If it's all now running properly, and you're in modem mode then I wouldn't worry about the LED colour.  

[bob8]

We were wondering earlier whether or not to request VM to replace the Hub 3, on the grounds that one of the LAN sockets had failed, and may be the yellow power light, even though we are only using it in 'modem mode'.

However, as the damage was caused by an act of god, would we be charged for replacing the hub?  I read a figure £25 bandied about.

Would a replacement usually require an engineer visit, or can be swapped out via postal method?

I presume any replacement would be a 'refurbed' Hub 3.

[Andrew-G · Accepted solution]

All aspects of the hub should work as intended, so yes you could ask for a replacement if one or more ports are not working, so it's not a "non-fault call" and wouldn't be chargeable.  You would likely get a recycled Hub 3, these vary in cleanliness and repair.  I did used to believe that VM's term "reconditioned" simply meant wiped with a greasy rag, but there's been sufficient reports here to dispel even that illusion.  Sometimes they'll post hubs out, more commonly they'll send a technician to do it.