This read-only counter, in cells, tracks the number of valid ATM cells with the EFCI header bit set to 0 in the egress direction of this channel, measured before the class-of-service queue. An admin uses this as the baseline of outbound cells not yet marked as congestion-experienced, useful for comparing against the EFCI=1 egress count to see how congestion marking evolves as traffic passes through the switch. For example, if EFCI=1 marked cells increase relative to this EFCI=0 count on the egress side, the admin knows the switch itself is now marking more outbound traffic as having experienced congestion.