Overbooking
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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.
Nevertheless this only happens when all users try to use the service at the same time and since nearly half of the users will not use the service at the same moment this almost never happens. The client benefit is also that the cost of subscriptions are lower. Reservation of capacity on networks is fairly expensive.
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. This allows them to have a (nearly) full vehicle on most runs, even though some customers may miss the trip or cancel at the last minute. If everyone shows up, at least in the case of airlines, they will offer an additional free ticket to anyone willing to take a later flight. They can do this and still make more money than if they booked only to the plane's capacity and had it take off with empty seats.
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.