This read-write object, ranging from 0 to 65535, associates a preferred route with a CES (Circuit Emulation Service) connection, with 0 meaning no preferred route is associated and the actual route defined in the cwaPrefRouteConfTable; setting this to 0 also automatically sets cesmChanDirectRoute to false. An administrator uses it to steer a specific circuit-emulation connection over a preferred path through the network rather than letting the switch pick any available route. For example, an engineer wanting a latency-sensitive CES circuit to always traverse a particular low-latency trunk would configure this object to point at that route's identifier in the preferred-route table.