An increased reliance in business on networking capabilities has boosted the remote access concentrators market, but failed to support sales of remote access servers, according to a report from Dataquest. Meanwhile Dell'Oro, another research group, reports that sales of shared hubs and LAN switches rose by eight per cent to $2.5 billion in Q2 this year. Dataquest projects healthy growth for the remote access concentrator market as companies come to rely on the Internet to increase productivity. Revenue in the sector totalled $494.1 million, up 6.8 percent from the second quarter of 1997. Cisco is doing particularly well, moving to the market leading position, as new business it attracts tends to stay with the company because of its range of products. Ritu Sani, an analyst at Dataquest, says the average net user in becoming increasingly sophisticated and is demanding more from the network. "ISPs are anticipating these changes and are beefing up their networks with equipment that can offer the desired levels of service and reliability, " she said. The report from Dell'Oro points to delayed buying as a major factor in the success of the LAN and shared hubs market in the second quarter. Customers were waiting for the lower prices on new products that were to be announced early in Q2, it said. The remote access server market did not fare so well, dropping nearly 38 per cent in the quarter. Bay Networks was the only top tier vendor to post positive results, with a 28 per cent increase on the first quarter of the year.®