This is a read-only counter, in packets, tracking the number of received voice packets that arrived too late to be played out by the CODEC during this call. An admin monitors this alongside the lost-packets counter, since late packets are effectively unusable for real-time playout even though they technically arrived, contributing to the same kind of audio gaps as outright packet loss. For example, an admin seeing high late-packet counts but low outright loss counts would suspect network jitter delaying packets rather than packets being dropped entirely.