Modern manufacturing practices pay close attention to stripping cost to the bone. Every effort is made to cut the BOM cost such as eliminating screws, connectors and going as far as programming production line to not populate minor surface mount chips not absolutely required for the sub-model.
So the pk5001z wireless gateway has a 5mm white LED and a plastic standoff populating the circuit board and this most definitely costs a few pennies on BOM.
The LED also stays lit 24/7 which increases the power consumption at the plug by about 0.1-0.2W. These fractions of watts matter a lot to designers when it comes to permitted phantom power by devices like cell phone charger when they're left plugged in and doing useful work.
This relatively bright white LED exists solely to illuminate the CenturyLink logo on the panel.
I wonder what the total of our bandwidth, computing power and hardware resources are wasted to run tasks that provides no useful purpose.
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