This read-only counter tallies cells discarded specifically because of Early Packet Discard, the frame-based congestion mechanism that drops an entire not-yet-started AAL5 frame's cells when the queue is already too congested to accept a new frame. Admins use this to see how much loss is attributable specifically to the EPD mechanism, relevant when ausmIngrDiscardOption is set to frameDiscard for this channel or its port. For example, a channel using frame-based discard that shows growing chanEpdDiscCells is proactively rejecting entire new frames under congestion, which is generally preferable to partial-frame loss.