What happens is very similar to what happens on a shared 10 Mbps ethernet bus (in fact the sharing protocol is the same CSMA/CD).
Its actually CSMA/CA (carrier sense multiple access/collision avoidance), which is more along the lines of 100Mbps Ethernet. The traffic starts backing off as it starts to get crowded, and slows down until things get back to normal. Here's a nice explanation.
http://alpha.fdu.edu/~kanoksri/IEEE80211b.html.
The maximum available rate would typically be divided by the number of users. Reality is probably not quite that good. But most of the time the backhaul is so much slower than the Wi-Fi bandwidth that it doesn't matter.
If you want to maximize bandwidth, use multiple radios on different frequencies.
simon
Sameer
--
Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D.
Asst. Professor of Information Systems
San Francisco State University
San Francisco CA 94132 USA
http://verma.sfsu.edu/
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