Hello,
Brandon is correct, these are not supported by TAC, but rather by the Small Business Support Center. A website covering the different warranties and service levels is available here:
Small Business Support
Small Business devices do not use SMARTNET contracts, but rather Small Business Service Contracts. There is some good documentation available on those contracts here:
Small Business Product Warranties
As for your specific questions, I'll just go through them one by one.
1. Limited Lifetime warranty in this case means the lifetime of that model of device. There will be an End-of-Life notice published, just like with enterprise devices, which will list the various dates when support and hardware replacement will end. Once this announcement is made you will usually still have several years for hardware replacement.
2. How fast devices get replaced sort of depends on which device we are talking about. The Sx300 and higher switch series come with Next Business Day Advanced Replacement by default, no need for an extra service contract for that. Most of the routers, access points, and the 100 and 200 series switches have Return to Factory Hardware warranties, and not all of them are LLW (the datasheets list what type of warranty each device has). However you can purchase a support contract for those devices which upgrades them to NBD AR as well, and extends the tech support for another 3 years.
3. The lifetime warranty varies slightly from product to product, but generally we cover the entire device, so power supply, fans, port failures, anything like that. There are a few exceptions of course, like lightning damage or opening the chassis, but that is all listed in the warranty at the links above. I would be more specific but not all of the devices are the same and I wouldn't want to give wrong information.
4. As for the replacement process, again it depends. All of the SBSC products come with 8X5 tech support, so you would be able to call in and we would troubleshoot to determine hardware failure. If you were outside the support hours you would usually have to call back the next day. We don't ship at night either way, so the RMA wouldn't happen until the next day regardless. Once again, if you decide to get a service contract you get 24x7 phone support. When you have an Advanced Replacement warranty the device will ship the same day if it is before the shipping cutoff (the engineer will know) and if not then the next day, with next business day shipping. The SBSC is not TAC, it is more like Small Business TAC, a separate department (although we can collaborate with TAC if you have a mixed SB/enterprise environment), but the SBSC is available 24x7x365, and all of our engineers are CCNA certified.
I figured I would put in one more link which may sum all of this up a bit:
Cisco Small Business Support Services At A Glance
Hope that answers your questions, if not just let me know,
Christopher Ebert - Advanced Network Support Engineer
Cisco Small Business Support Center
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