This read-only Counter32 is a running tally of the total volume of traffic received, in bytes on this repeater (network segment) since the counter was last reset (it wraps back to zero on overflow, standard SNMP counter behavior). An admin polls rptrPktStatsBytes periodically to estimate average frame size and overall utilization when compared against the matching packet counter. For example, comparing rptrPktStatsBytes against the same repeater's error/collision counters gives a quick sense of whether this repeater's traffic level is healthy or already causing contention.