This read-write flag enables or disables ATM frame-level discard (partial packet discard/EPD-style behavior) for this circuit, meaning that when congestion forces cell drops, the switch discards all remaining cells of an already-partially-dropped AAL5 frame rather than sending a frame that's guaranteed to fail its CRC/length check at the far end. Enabling this saves downstream bandwidth by not transmitting doomed partial frames, at the cost of the switch needing to track frame boundaries per VC. An engineer troubleshooting wasted bandwidth on a congested PVC that shows normal cell-loss counters but high AAL5 reassembly errors downstream might enable cktAtmFrameDiscard to stop forwarding the tail ends of already-corrupted frames.