This counter reports the total frames of ingress traffic on this PM instance that exceeded even the excess rate and were outright discarded, during the current, still-filling 15-minute window. Any nonzero value accumulated over the still-accumulating current interval represents traffic this specific service actually lost at ingress due to rate policing, which is a direct, quantifiable cause for a customer's throughput or application-quality complaint on this port, distinct from congestion elsewhere in the network. For example, a frame-drop count that climbs in lockstep with the byte-drop count (rather than being disproportionately higher) within the still-accumulating current interval tells you the discarded traffic was mostly full-size frames, consistent with a bulk transfer rather than a flood of small packets.