In case of equally sized data packets, round-robin scheduling is max-min fair.
Generally, policies for sharing resources that are characterized by low level of fairness (see fairness measures) provide high average throughput but low stability in the service quality, meaning that the achieved service quality is varying in time depending on the behavior of other users.
If this instability is severe, it may result in unhappy users who will choose another more stable communication service.
Expensive data flows achieve lower service quality than others in proportional fairness, but do not suffer from starvation.
A flow on its path through the network may be divided between "parallel" links, in a load balancing scheme.
The name “max-min” comes from the idea that it is the rate of the smaller (or minimum) flows that is made as large as possible (maximized) by the algorithm.
Also note, that this definition does not forbid a single bottleneck link to be shared between multiple flows.
If resources are allocated in advance in the network nodes, max-min fairness can be obtained by using an algorithm of progressive filling.