oversubscribed - technical definition

Refers to connecting more users to a system than can be fully supported if all of them were using it at the same time. Networks and servers are almost always designed with some amount of oversubscription, counting on the fact that everybody does not need the service simultaneously. If they do, delays are certainly the result, and outages may also occur.

An oversubscription of eight to one is not uncommon for Internet access, which means that only one out of eight users can be supported at sustained, maximum speed. However, with the Internet's TCP/IP packet switching architecture, all users could be online at the same time without noticing delays, because there is so much idle time while people read the Web pages they retrieve.