I'm based in the UK, where there is no such thing as a business license and VAT registration is only required for turnovers greater than £85,000 - so Keysight are effectively discriminating against small businesses just in case someone wants to buy a 7.5 digit multimeter for domestic use.
Quit whining and register a business. Gets you a lot of perks as well like being able to shop at all kinds of stores selling to companies only.
Since this thread has been brought to the fore again, I thought I'd respond to this.
Registering and maintaining a business has costs associated with it, both initial and recurring, and both in terms of time and out of pocket expense. Those costs will obviously vary from country to country, as well as with the type of business, but they exist all the same. If what we were talking about here were something that was itself a recurring thing, then doing that might well be justifiable.
But what we're talking about here is a
one time repair, or, at least, one-time acquisition of parts. That already has costs associated with it. At some point, the cost of dealing with the malfunction plus the cost of setting up and maintaining the business will exceed the price of a replacement unit, after which the original unit will be able to act as a source of spare parts if nothing else.
I can't tell at what point those costs intersect, but won't be surprised if that would be a handful of years at most.
In any case, registering a business and going through all of the things required to maintain it seems
quite excessive just for the "privilege" of getting your test equipment repaired. It may be that having such a "business" gets you some perks. But that's irrelevant here. People who have real use for those perks and who have decided that they're worth the additional hassle and expense will have already registered a business, making this a non-issue for them in the first place. The OP is clearly not such a person. For him, his
sole purpose of going out of his way to register and maintain the business would be to make repair of his unit possible. That
is excessive. At a minimum, he will be without use of his unit until the registration is approved.
And because a future repair may be necessary, it may (depending on the laws in his country) be necessary for him to maintain his "business" simply to have the
option of a later repair. Or it may be that he can perform the registration, get the unit repaired, and then immediately terminate the "business", and recreate it at whatever point he may need a future repair.
His alternative is to simply purchase an equivalent replacement unit, likely from a different manufacturer who will actually stand behind their products purchased by an individual in the UK, and to sell the 34470A (thus offsetting the cost somewhat) or keep it for parts.
Frankly, if I were the OP, and absent circumstances that I'm not aware of, there wouldn't even be a question in my mind of the proper approach here: I'd replace the unit with one from a manufacturer that isn't stupid enough to jeopardize its future sales like Keysight is clearly doing here. Since Keysight has clearly decided that individuals are not worth anything to them, the OP has plenty of incentive to, in his own way, make it clear to them
exactly what the consequences of such a myopic policy is: the loss of business both from this individual and from any company he has sufficient influence over.
If Keysight's decision here turns out to be a beneficial one for them, then more power to them. But I see no reason whatsoever for an individual to play their game. It's only by changing our purchasing actions that we as individuals can cause Keysight to see the real consequences of their policy, for better or for worse.
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