This counter reports the total bytes of ingress traffic on this PM instance that exceeded even the excess rate and were outright discarded, during the entire life of the counter to date. Because this is a life-to-date total that accumulates without any clear-time field defined for it, its growth rate over the tracked span -- rather than any single interval -- is what tells you whether ingress loss on this service is a rare one-off event or a chronic, ongoing rate-plan mismatch. For example, a life-to-date dropped-byte total that grows by roughly the same amount every month indicates an ongoing, unresolved rate mismatch, whereas one dominated by a single large jump points to one specific past incident that has since been resolved.