Echo and poor connections

Hi.
I am using FreePBX 2.10 on a new, dedicated and relatively fast PC which has 500Gb drive space, leading me to think that PC hardware should be OK.

My users are complaining of a high proportion of connection failures when dialing out and a poor quality audio on many occasions, notably echo.

The phone are CISCO units, so should be of a decent quality.

What are the kind of thisngs I should be looking for to diagnose the faults and to help to improve the quality of the system.

Regards.

Mark.

What are the trunks you are using?

Calls to landlines go out on SIP trunks through Hostcomm. We only have about 6 phones, and have 6 trunks.

Calls to landlines go out on 2 GSM trunks (via Vodafone UK and a GSM gateway).

I haven’t yet determined from the users if the issues are specific to calls to landlines or calls to mobiles.

So it’s echo not not jitter? Check your echo settings on your gateway assuming you have landlines. Normally I think echo cancellation is controlled in the gateway. If you have multiple points trying to control the echo they’ll fight each other and can make it worse. Entering dahdi_cfg -vv from the # prompt may give you some clues.

On the other hand, if it’s jitter go to the Settings/Asterisk SIP Settings menu and scroll down to the jitter buffer. Enable it and force it to yes with adaptive implementation and a jitter buffer size of 300 with a 500 threshold and see if that helps. I know… jitter and not echo but sometimes people confuse the two.

I should have also mentioned the echo test. If you press *43 from the phone you can get a feel for the echo. It will of course have one so what you’re looking for is the length of the delay and consistency of the delay. You should hear your voice with just a short delay.

Thanks Jerry.
I have never experienced the issue myself, so I don’t know if its echo or Jitter…that said, I have made the ‘Jitter’ changes you suggested, so hopefully that may solve it.

I am not sure where the echo settings are…you say on my gateway, sorry but not sure of the terminology, what is my gateway? The router?

Regards

Mark.

Some people have physical phone lines which they use with their FreeBPX box. The device that converts those physical lines into usable VOIP lines is a Gateway. If you don’t have physical phone lines from the local phone company then you don’t have a gateway. Your only connection is to your VOIP provider and you connect to them using a “Trunk” in FreePBX. Make sense? Many people will have both a trunk and a gateway as they use a combination of physical lines and VOIP (usually with the physical lines being a backup line in case of Internet failure, but not always the case). And some people will have multiple trunk lines because they get better rates from different providers, or want redundancy.

You’ve got a great phone system there. It does more than you probably ever imagined but there is a bit of a learning curve. You’ll be fine.