This read-only Counter64 is the frame-level counterpart of the Dropped-bytes counter — frames received on this PM instance that were discarded. Dividing this by the accepted-frames counter on the same instance gives the frame loss ratio for that flow point, which is what actually predicts retransmissions or visible quality drops for whatever traffic rides it; because it is drawn from the lifetime bin, which keeps accumulating until an operator explicitly clears it, a sudden plateau on an otherwise busy instance is itself a signal — most likely that someone cleared the stats rather than that traffic actually stopped. On a 100 Mbps residential broadband EFP, this might read 85,000 frames over the 89 days since the counters were last cleared, which an admin would cross-check against the matching byte counter to see if average frame size looks normal for that service.