This Counter32 tallies frames discarded on this FR_ICI transmission path due to congestion, counting both frames with and without the Discard Eligible (DE) bit set, as specified in GR-1327-CORE section 7.2.1. Admins use it to see how much traffic loss on the inter-carrier link is caused by congestion at a resource-constrained point rather than by errors, which is a capacity-planning signal rather than a fault-isolation one. For example, a carrier operations team seeing this counter climb during peak hours would consider increasing committed information rate provisioning or adding capacity on that FR_ICI path.