This read-only counter, in cells, tracks the number of valid EFCI=0 cells in the egress direction of this channel that were discarded at the class-of-service queue. An admin cares because these cells were not marked as congested yet still had to be dropped on egress, indicating real local congestion in the outbound path of the switch. For example, discards appearing here despite the cells not being congestion-marked signal to the admin that this channel's egress queue itself is the bottleneck, not upstream network conditions.