This read-only counter, in cells, tracks the number of valid ATM cells with the EFCI header bit set to 0 in the ingress direction of this channel, measured before the class-of-service queue. An admin uses EFCI=0 counts as the baseline of cells not yet marked as experiencing forward congestion, useful for comparing against the EFCI=1 count to gauge how much of the traffic has been marked congested upstream. For example, a rising ratio of EFCI=1 to EFCI=0 cells arriving on this channel would tell the admin that upstream network elements are increasingly signaling congestion for this connection's traffic.