This is the cumulative byte volume discarded from this specific QoS queue. Comparing dropped bytes against sent bytes (cdmipQosStatsSentBytes) for the same queue gives a per-rule loss percentage, which is what an admin needs to judge whether a queue's bandwidth allocation is too small for the traffic assigned to it. For example, 10 MB dropped against 100 MB sent on one queue, a 9% loss rate, would justify raising that rule's cdmipQosRulesMaxBw.