Abstract. In this paper, the asymptotic behaviour of the distribution tail of the stationary waiting time W in the GI/GI/2 FCFS queue is studied. Under subexponential-type assumptions on the service time distribution, bounds and sharp asymptotics are given for the probability P{W > x}. We also get asymptotics for the distribution tail of a stationary two-dimensional workload vector and of a stationary queue length. These asymptotics depend heavily on the traffic load.