Overage is a term use in the wireless telephone industry to describe billed charges for when a wireless consumer uses a larger number of minutes than their agreed upon price plan allows. In order to maintain high availability, most wireless carriers only allow a certain number of minutes of usage per subscriber per month -- especially during "peak hours": the time when historically the largest number of mobile phone users attempt to use the network. The minutes included with a user's price plan are normally relatively inexpensive (compare with prepaid minutes for example). If a user exceeds the minutes provided by their price plan, extra minutes are made available at a more expensive rate (in this case usually exceeding the rate for comparable prepaid minutes). Such charges for minutes are referred to as "overage" and are considered an undesirable outcome save in emergency situations. The other well tested alternative to using more minutes than agreed upon would be to disable the subscriber at that point, which some prepaid and hybrid service plans deploy. This has the alternate drawback of making the phone potentially unavailable in case it is suddenly needed.