This OID is a running total of all outbound packets transmitted on this 40 Gbps Ethernet (40GbE) interface since its statistics were last cleared. Comparing the growth rate of this counter against the inbound packet counter tells an admin whether this link's traffic is packet-count symmetric, which is useful when the octet counters alone don't reveal a directional imbalance. For example, on a 40GbE trunk aggregating several client services, an outbound packet count that consistently outpaces the inbound count could reflect a workload such as video streaming that sends far more packets than it receives.