We focus our paper on wireless local area networks such as IEEE 802.11 that have become popular as access networks to the wireless mobile Internet. They can be deployed in hot spots areas and offer performance comparable to wired local area networks. The question of the performance effectively perceived by mobile hosts becomes increasingly important as many new emerging applications such as mobile information access, real-time multimedia communications, networked games, immersion worlds, cooperative work require sufficient bandwidth. Although IEEE 802.11b provides a means for allocating a part of the radio channel bandwidth to some hosts (PCF - Point Coordination Function), the commonly available access method (DCF - Distributed Coordination Function) uses the CSMA/CA protocol to share the radio channel in a fair way. However, we have observed that in some common situations in a wireless environment, the method results in a considerable performance degradation. In a typical wireless local area network, some hosts may be far away from their access point so that the quality of their radio transmissions is low. In this case current 802.11b products degrade the bit rate from the nominal 11 Mb/s rate to 5.5, 2, or 1 Mb/s – when a host detects repeated unsuccessful frame transmissions, it decreases its bit rate. If there is at least one host with a lower rate, a 802.11 cell presents a performance anomaly: the throughput of all hosts transmitting at the higher rate is degraded belowthe level of the lower rate. Such a behavior penalizes fast hosts and privileges the slow one. The reason for this anomaly is the basic CSMA/CA channel access method which guarantees that the long term channel access probability is equal for all hosts. When one host captures the channel for a long time because its bit rate is low, it penalizes other hosts that use the higher rate.