This is the lifetime, cumulative count of Remote Failure Indications this path has received from the far end since the counter was last cleared. Because it never resets on its own, an admin can use a sudden jump in this counter between two manual checks (rather than its absolute value) to detect that the far end has newly started reporting trouble, even without checking the interval-history tables. If this counter read 12 last week and reads 85 today, the far end has logged 73 new failure indications in the interim, warranting a look at the far-end interval-history tables to find exactly when.