This is a read-only counter, in packets, tracking the number of received voice packets that arrived too early to be stored in the jitter buffer during this call. An admin monitors this to detect cases where the sender's timing or the jitter buffer sizing is causing otherwise-good packets to be discarded simply because they showed up ahead of schedule. For example, a rising early-packets count alongside otherwise normal loss statistics might lead an admin to consider increasing the jitter buffer size rather than assuming the network is at fault.