This reports whether a manual force-switch is active on the west side of this specific virtual ring, distinct from the force-switch objects at the logical (physical) ring level, since force-switches in G.8032 can be applied per virtual ring/VLAN service rather than only to the whole physical ring. This finer granularity lets an admin force-switch just one customer's or service's virtual ring for a controlled test or migration without disrupting every other virtual ring sharing the same physical logical ring. For example, an admin migrating one customer's VLAN service to a new access link could force-switch only that customer's virtual ring west link to on(2), leaving every other virtual ring on the same physical ring unaffected.