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Overbooking is a term used to describe the sale of access to a transport mechanism which exceeds the bandwidth of the transport. In the telecommunications industry, overbooking -- such as in the frame relay world -- means that a telephone company has sold access to too many customers which basically flood the telephone company's lines, resulting in an inability for some customers to use what they purchased for periods of time.
It's the same for the vehicle transportation infrastructure: An airline, locomotive, or shipping company can book more customers onto a vehicle than can actually be accommodated by an aircraft, locomotive, or ship.
Typically in the transportation arena a company can add additional air flights, add more cars or consists to a train, move to a larger ship or add ships or containers to a cargo transport. In the telecommunications industry a common carrier may be able to solve an overbooking problem by adding bandwidth -- either by adding lines to an existing system, reconfiguring existing lines, upgrading existing lines to a higher speed line or greater number of time-multiplexed lines, or some other scheme to add bandwidth.
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