Ubiquiti UI Care

What is Ubiquiti UI Care?

UI Care is Ubiquiti's extended warranty for UniFi hardware. Ubiquiti does not call it a warranty — formally it is a membership plan, not a warranty contract — but it is what people mean when they search for a Ubiquiti or UniFi extended warranty in Australia. It runs for five years, replaces failed hardware in advance, and is bought at the same time as the device.

UI Care is an optional membership plan you buy alongside eligible UniFi hardware. If a covered device fails during the term from a manufacturer's defect in materials and workmanship, Ubiquiti replaces it — and unlike a standard warranty claim, you do not have to return the faulty unit first. Ubiquiti issues a prepaid return label, holds replacement stock aside for members, and expects to ship your replacement within 30 days.

It is important to be clear about what UI Care is not. In Ubiquiti's own words it is a product replacement programme only — not an insurance policy, warranty contract under state insurance law, financial product or service contract — and it does not cover theft, loss or other risks typically covered by insurance. Accidental damage is explicitly excluded.

ARC IP Networks is an authorised Ubiquiti reseller. Because eligibility requires that UI Care is purchased substantially simultaneously with the device, we add it to your order at the point of sale rather than selling it as a standalone product afterwards.

Is UI Care worth it?

It depends far less on the failure rate than on what the device costs you when it is down. UniFi hardware is generally reliable, so the value of UI Care is not really about expecting a failure — it is about how fast you recover from one, and who carries the cost and the wait.

UI Care usually makes sense on:

• Single points of failure. The gateway, the core switch or the recorder — anything whose failure takes the whole site down rather than one desk or one camera.
• Remote or hard-to-reach sites where a second truck roll to swap hardware costs more than the plan did.
• Expensive, long-lead-time hardware such as enterprise recorders and aggregation switches, where buying a replacement out of pocket while an RMA runs its course is a real cash impact.
• Sites you are contractually responsible for. If you are an installer carrying an uptime obligation, advance replacement and reserved stock convert an unknown outage window into a predictable one.

It is usually harder to justify on:

• Cheap, redundant, easily-swapped devices — an access point in a building with fifteen others, where the plan can approach a meaningful share of the hardware price and you can simply keep a cold spare.
• Sites where you already hold spares. A shelf spare gives you a faster swap than any RMA process, including this one.
• Hardware you expect to replace inside five years anyway, since the plan is not transferable if you sell or move the device on.

A practical middle path most Australian installers land on: cover the head-end — gateway, core switch, NVR — and self-insure the edge with a spare or two. If you want a second opinion on where the line sits for your specific build, our Melbourne team does this daily.

What UI Care does not cover

UI Care replaces hardware that fails from a manufacturer's defect in materials and workmanship. The following are excluded:

• Normal maintenance, and cosmetic changes that do not affect performance.
• Damage from natural disaster, including lightning, flood, tornado, earthquake, heavy rain or hurricane.
• Damage from power surges, improper power supply, electrical current fluctuations or corrosive-environment installation.
• Misuse, abuse, improper handling, negligence, abnormal physical, electromagnetic or electrical stress, or accident. UI Care is not accidental-damage cover.
• Products modified, altered, repaired by a third party, painted or rebranded.
• Damage caused by third-party hardware, software or firmware.
• Products with the original Ubiquiti labels missing, or non-Ubiquiti branded hardware.
• Products not installed, operated or maintained per the Quick Start Guide, User Guide and Ubiquiti's published specifications.
• Products sold or shipped outside your country of residence, or to a country Ubiquiti does not ship to at the time of replacement.
• Products not received back by Ubiquiti within 90 days of the RMA being issued.

You remain responsible for normal care and maintenance, and for all backup, recovery and reinstallation of software or data.