802.11 throughput with clients with mixed reception.

I'm curious as to what happens in the following situation:

Let's pretend we have a single 802.11b access point with a very fast
connection to the outside world. Let us also pretend that sitting
right next to the AP it is a wireless client with excellent reception
that can communicate with the access point at 11 Mb/s. Let us also
assume that some distance away is another client with not-so-hot
reception that can communicate with the access point at a maximum
rate of 2 Mb/s. Now, let us assume that both of these clients will
try to talk to a computer on the outside world. What performance will
they each see?

It seems to me that either (a) the spectrum will be divided roughly
equally between the two, and the slow one will see 1 Mb/s and the
fast one will see about 5.5 Mb/s, or (b) they'll both sync down to the
lowest common denominator, and both see about 1 Mb/s of throughput.
Which is it?

Note, I'm *not* talking about a situation such as when an 802.11b client
connects to an 802.11g network. There it's clear that one 802.11b client
will cause the whole network to run at "b" speeds. In my example, everyone's
running the same protocol.

Would the answer to this question change with different wireless protocols?


--
Nick Christenson
(E-Mail Removed)