Here’s an interesting phenomenon I came across recently on a router that was in constant operation for well over two years: The white LEDs that were constantly switched-on did not age very gracefully.
The picture above shows the power LED, the Internet LED and the 5 GHz Wi-Fi LED, which are very dim compared to the 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi LED that was off for the past two years. The picture is even exaggerating a bit. Under normal lighting conditions, the dim LEDs are hardly visible anymore. I haven’t come across this kind of aging before so I thought I’d post a picture here. The rest of the router aged much more gracefully, it still works perfectly.
I had a similar issue with some access points that had a blue led status light. After about a year or two, they had faded so much you could barely see that they were on, even with the room darkened.