Buy a switch on eBay and you're still covered

HP has said that it will honour the lifetime warranty of its ProCurve networking kit even if it has been sold on to a second party.

Mark J Hilton, marketing manager for EMEA at HP ProCurve, explained that technically the warranty ends if the equipment is sold to a second party but that the company usually continues to offer support.

"The policy is valid, as long as you own the kit. But if you transfer it to somebody else we typically honour that as well," he said.

Andy Bryant, HP's market development manager for EMEA, added: "You can buy one of our old switches on eBay and still get our service."

Hilton claimed that the warranty could even see kit refreshed if it is still being used but is no longer going to be supported by the company.

"We will move people up to the next equivalent or higher performance levels and we may swap out the next-generation parts so it allows us to keep moving," he said.

The lifetime guarantee is not available in Germany, however. "There is a legal issue in Germany where you cannot say 'lifetime' without defining it. You have to give it a number, so we say it is 30 years," said Bryant.

He added that HP offers the lifetime warranty because it trusts the reliability of its products.

"We have been selling these modules for the past 18 months, we know what their failure rate is and we know it is low enough to take the risk of giving away a lifetime warranty," said Bryant.