This read-only Counter reports the number of packets on the Ethernet medium that the LANCE controller detected but failed to capture into the inbound queue, effectively packets dropped due to receive-side resource exhaustion. An admin seeing this counter climb would recognize the interface is losing incoming traffic under load rather than passing it up the stack. For example, a rising cntdot3LanceMissedPkts count during a traffic surge would explain application-level packet loss that isn't visible in any higher-layer counter.