I’m sure this is not a FreePBX issue, but I’m hoping someone can shed some light here. I’ve looked around for answers, but all I can find is people with similar problems with TDM.
As you may have guessed, we’re not using TDM, faxing, FXO, or ANY analog whatsoever. We do not have any modems attached to the server either.
The basics are: I have a few systems with an old trixbox installation. NO CLICKING.
I’ve grown to hate trixbox, so we put together a custom deployment of asterisk 1.4 and FreePBX 1.7. The system works great…except for the random clicking. It’s not constant. Just every once in a while (30 seconds to a few minutes) you’ll hear some clicking on the receiving end. It almost sounds like a loose wire, but it happens on speaker phone too. AND it happens on all of the new non-trixbox servers.
Only external callers hear the clicking. The internal user cannot hear it at all.
It doesn’t sound like a simple fix - there is no “Intermittent Clicking - On/Off” option in FreePBX!
However, the symptoms you describe make it a little easier to troubleshoot. The issue is obviously on the outbound side (because the external caller hears it) so you may be able to implement some QOS rules in your router to give the outbound voice traffic the highest priority.
It sounds to me like something on the network (maybe even the PBX itself) is sending out bursts of packets that degrade your voice quality. You could always do some packet sniffing with Wireshark to try and nail it down for sure…