Image: Zinyange Auntony / Lehtikuva

The Foreign Ministry confirmed Saturday that all four passengers aboard a light air plane that crashed in Zimbabwe on Friday were Finnish citizens.

Among the passengers confirmed dead was 52-year-old Pekka Ojanpää, chief executive of the maintenance services and circular economy firm Lassila & Tikkanoja, daily Helsingin Sanomat reported on Saturday.

Image: Emmi Korhonen / Lehtikuva

Another of the crash victims was 51-year-old Heikki Vappula, director of forestry company UPM’s Biorefining business unit.

All of the Finns on board the ill-fated Cessna S206 aircraft were said to be men in their 50s. The pilot also died in the crash.

Image: Trond H. Trosdahl / Lehtikuva

Reports indicate that the plane took off in cloudy conditions from an airfield near Chiredzi in the mountainous Masvingo province and was bound for Victoria Falls.

According to the Zimbabwe public broadcaster the victims’ bodies were transferred to the Masvingo hospital for forensic examinations.

Accident investigation agency still in dark

Finland’s Safety Investigation Authority Otkes had not yet received any information from Zimbabwean officials about the crash, director Veli-Pekka Nurmi told STT news agency on Saturday.

"It seems that we will not get it, at least this weekend," he added.

According to Nurmi, it does not seem likely that Otkes personnel will travel to the crash site, which is in rugged terrain, for an investigation. He noted that if the plane was manufactured in the US for example, investigators are likely to seek information in that direction.

The Otkes director said that it is quite typical for officials from different countries to cooperate on a flight crash investigation. He explained that the state in which the aircraft is registered and operated as well as the country where it was designed and manufactured all have a right to appoint a representative to take part in the investigation.

"And then there are participating states which get involved if their nationals are victims. This option only provides limited access to information. The right is restricted to information about the victims," Nurmi pointed out.

"Typical of a light airplane crash"

Nurmi said that he had seen photos of the crash site in media reports and noted that they do not show anything unusual.

"Pretty typical traces of a light airplane crash. That’s what it looks like," he said, adding that Cessna aircraft are reliable and widely used. He said that what can make a difference in aviation is how aircraft are maintained and serviced.

"Even good planes can malfunction if they are neglected and vice versa," Nurmi declared.</s>The Wi-Fi router offers up to 2600 Mbps Wi-Fi speed.</s>Four Finnish tourists on a hunting expedition have died in a plane crash in Zimbabwe.

The crash on Friday also killed their pilot Barry Style, the Finnish consul in the African country said today.

The plane, reported to be a Cessna-182 light aircraft, crashed near Zimbabwe's southern city of Masvingo.

'There were four Finnish citizens and their pilot in the plane, they all died,' Sally Ward told AFP.

'It was cloudy and they were trying to get above the clouds.'

The accident occurred near Renco, a gold mine on the outskirts of Masvingo, police spokesman Paul Nyathi said.

According to ZimLive the passengers were flying from Buffalo Range Airport in Chiredzi to the country's famous Victoria Falls.

The bodies were said to have been so badly destroyed in the crash that emergency services initially thought only three had died, it is claimed.

Investigators also found a Finnish identity card and a passport at the scene, police said.</s>Britain's SMBs could be missing out on huge business opportunities due to Wi-Fi problems, according to new research.

A report from Netgear has found that nine out of ten UK businesses experience at least one issue with their Wi-Fi that has prevented them from meeting business needs.

The survey of 1000 UK SMBs across more than fifty sectors identified issues including poor coverage (18 per cent), dropped connections (33 percent) and slow connections (38 percent).

This is despite 82 percent of SMBs considering it important to offer customers a good Wi-Fi connection, of which half (52 percent) rely on Wi-Fi for customer retention.
• Best wireless routers 2018: the best routers for your home network

The benefits of providing Wi-Fi are evident for those businesses that offer free connectivity to customers, with 16 percent saying it increases footfall and 24 percent saying customers spend more time on the premises.

Over a third (36 percent) said that Wi-Fi is important for attracting new customers, and over 70 percent said that Wi-Fi is important for providing improved customer service.

Netgear believes that mesh Wi-Fi could provide the answer for many of the issues, however many businesses aren't aware of the service. Mesh Wi-Fi networks operate from a main router connected to the modem, which is supported by a number of satellite modules to help create a single network that can cover a much wider space.

“UK businesses recognise that customers expect a good Wi-Fi connection, and many SMBs rely on Wi-Fi for critical revenue-driving functions,” said Ollie Randall, UK Regional Director of NETGEAR. “However, nine out of ten businesses are still experiencing Wi-Fi issues that are easily preventable with mesh Wi-Fi technology.”
• The best Netgear deals for Black Friday 2018</s>MASVINGO– A small plane went down in Tokwane-Ngundu, Masvingo Province, on Friday morning killing five people including four tourists from Finland.

The Zimbabwean pilot of the Cessna 182 aircraft, who died in the crash, has been named as Barry Style.

The Civil Aviation Authority of Zimbabwe has sent accident investigators to the scene.

The plane crashed into a rocky outcrop and broke apart. So dismembered were the bodies of the five victims that first responders at the horrific scene initially thought they had three victims.

‘There were four Finnish citizens and their pilot in the plane, they all died,’ Sally Ward told AFP.

‘It was cloudy and they were trying to get above the clouds.’

The accident occurred near Renco, a gold mine on the outskirts of Masvingo, police spokesman Paul Nyathi said.

‘It was cloudy and they were trying to get above the clouds.’

The accident occurred near Renco, a gold mine on the outskirts of Masvingo, police spokesman Paul Nyathi said.

According to ZimLive the passengers were flying from Buffalo Range Airport in Chiredzi to the country’s famous Victoria Falls.

The bodies were said to have been so badly destroyed in the crash that emergency services initially thought only three had died, it is claimed.

Investigators also found a Finnish identity card and a passport at the scene, police said.</s>Natraj Akella is a Telecom Industry Leader and has worked with Airtel, Microsoft & IBM

Information To Every One (i2e1), a startup in Wi-Fi connectivity space in India, has appointed former Head of Wi-Fi business at Tata Teleservices Natraj Akella as the Head – Growth of its B2B Business as the company seeks to proliferate in the Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi based Analytics market.

 A Management graduate from Faculty of Management Studies (FMS, Delhi University) and Tech graduate from Indian Institute of Kharagpur (IIT – KGP), Natraj contributed 20 years of his career in solving problems in Mobile, Consumer Internet and Wi-Fi. Before Tata Teleservices, Natraj was working with Airtel for about 6 years in various roles including Airtel 4G and Wi-Fi Services. Prior to Airtel, he worked with Microsoft and IBM, in Product Marketing.

 Natraj has played leadership roles in launch and scale-up of several new businesses & OTT services in software, cloud and Telecoms.

 On this occasion, Satyam Darmora, CEO & Founder, i2e1 said, “We are happy that Natraj has joined our tribe of alchemists. We are excited and look forward to learning from him and together create a path-breaking model.”

 “i2e1 has shown strong product-market fit in the last two years. The need is to grow at a faster pace with flawless execution to realize the vision of impacting lives of 500 million people. Natraj’s experience, entrepreneurial zeal and leadership will be instrumental in this journey ahead.”

 Natraj said, “Excited to be part of the incredible i2e1 team, which is working on making Wi-Fi simple, affordable and accessible to millions in India and abroad. Look forward to partnering with Telcos, ISP’s, Consumer Internet companies and SI’s for both, our Cloud Wi-Fi & Analytics platform and our retail Wi-Fi & Marketing solutions, in India and abroad.”</s>When did Wi-Fi get so confusing? We all know that Wi-Fi is migrating to 5GHz, but that's about to be exacerbated by the arrival of LTE-U. But what of HaLow, 802.11ad, 802.11ax, 802.11ay, WiGig, LPWAN and MU-MIMO? Why are Intel, Peraso, and Qualcomm all focusing on 802.11ad?

Mostly it's about improvements in efficiency, range, and power consumption, but here's our guide to Wi-Fi, how it's changing, and what it means for IT – and the IoT.

The IEEE 802.11 family of LAN standards is what we know as Wi-Fi. Recently Wi-Fi routers have been moving from 802.11n to the latest 802.11ac Wi-Fi standard, with the number of speed increasing antennas multiplying, too.

The last few years have also seen printers, cameras and smart home devices using Wi-Fi Direct, an ad-hoc P2P network that peaks at 250Mbps. However, the real evolution in Wi-Fi routers of late has been the choice of using either the 2.4GHz and 5GHz spectrum in homes, with so-called '2G', the former, being the original flavour of Wi-Fi. 2G is crowded but offers better coverage than '5G', which has a shorter range but higher data rates.

So 2G is great for using when you're in the attic far from the router, and 5G is best for when you're close to it and want to download a movie. Routers that offer 2G and 5G are everywhere, but there's a lot more to Wi-Fi's future.

What is AC5400, AC5300, MU-MIMO and 802.11ax?

2016 has seen a few so-called 'tri-band gigabit' 802.11ac Wi-Fi routers. Although these promise between 5,300Mbps to 5,400Mbps per second – hence the use of two informal names, AC5300 or AC5400 – this is actually just the addition of an extra 5GHz channel to the regular dual-band routers.

As such, this innovation is about added convenience to existing tech, not something radically new. Incoming models include the Linksys EA9500 Max-Stream and Asus RT-AC5300, both of which also include MU-MIMO, which stands for Multiple User, Multiple-Input, Multiple-Output.

Recognising that modern homes are clogged with myriad devices all vying for bandwidth – especially video streaming – MU-MIMO shares that bandwidth equally and is expected to become a default feature on Wi-Fi routers of the future.

Much more exciting is the prospect of Wi-Fi routers with 802.11ax. Now under development and primed for launch in 2019, 802.11ax has been shown to offer 10Gbit/s while still operating in the 5GHz band. ABI Research forecasts that 802.11ax will account for 57% of Wi-Fi chipsets by 2021. So 802.11ax is the 'next normal' for Wi-Fi routers.

What are 802.11ad and WiGig?

These are exactly the same thing. WiGig (short for Wireless Gigabit) is premium Wi-Fi, using the unlicensed 60GHz spectrum to deliver astonishingly fast speeds of up to 7Gbps via four 2.16GHz bands. As such the gigabit Wi-Fi offered by WiGig is perfectly suited to the 5G era, when Full HD and 4K video will be created and uploaded by smartphones. Whether 5G or WiGig is being utilised won't make much difference to the user, which is the point behind WiGig; seamless data transfers of uncompressed video wherever you are.

Its 5G tie-up means WiGig won't be seen for a few years yet, though trials are underway. TP-Link, NetGear and Elecom all demoed WiGig routers at CES 2016, while Peraso just showed off the first WiGig USB dongle at Computex 2016. Expect WiGig access points, networking adaptors and, eventually, tablets, smartphones and laptops.

ABI Research estimates that by 2018, over 600 million WiGig chips will be sold annually. Also on the horizon, as an enhancement to WiGig, is 802.11ay – it works at 60GHz and offers as much as 20Gbit/s, though it can only work at very short range.
• Could Wi-Fi be replaced by Li-Fi?</s>Four Finns on a hunting expedition died in a plane crash Friday that also killed their pilot near Zimbabwe's southern city of Masvingo, the Finnish consul's wife told AFP.

"There were four Finnish citizens and their pilot in the plane, they all died," Sally Ward told AFP.

"It was cloudy and they were trying to get above the clouds."

Police spokesperson Paul Nyathi said the accident occurred near Renco, a gold mine on the outskirts of Masvingo and that investigators had found a Finnish identity card and a passport at the scene.</s>HELSINKI (Reuters) - Four Finnish citizens are believed to have been among five people who died in a plane crash in Zimbabwe on Friday, their companies and Finland’s foreign ministry said.

The plane crashed near Masvingo, the ministry said.

Finnish pulp and paper maker UPM said Heikki Vappula, 51, executive vice president of UPM Biorefining, appeared on the passenger list of the crashed private plane.

“We owe a debt of gratitude to Heikki who was a visionary and inspiring executive... His insights and energy will be greatly missed,” UPM Chief Executive Jussi Pesonen said in a statement.

Lassila & Tikanoja CEO Pekka Ojanpaa, 52, was also among the victims, the environmental and support services firm said.

“Pekka served as President and CEO of Lassila & Tikanoja for seven years... Our deepest condolences to Pekka’s family and closest ones in this time of loss”, company chairman Heikki Bergholm said.

Ojanpaa was set to leave Lassila & Tikanoja at the end of this month to start working as chief executive of another Finnish company, fibre maker Suominen Corporation.

The ministry said it had received confirmation from Zimbabwean authorities regarding the four Finns involved.

The two other Finns on the crashed plane were a 53-year-old technology expert and a partner of a law firm, Finnish media reported.

The four men are believed to have been on a private hunting trip, media reported.</s>Smartphone users in 33 countries now experience faster speeds using a cellular network in comparison to Wi-Fi, but mobile technology in three developed markets including the US continue to underperform, a new OpenSignal report found.

In a study looking into Wi-Fi and the mobile network experience, wireless mapping company OpenSignal said mobile download speeds proved superior to Wi-Fi in a range of countries, including richer nations like Australia and France, as well as less developed markets such as Qatar, Turkey, Mexico and South Africa.

However, in three highly developed geographies – the US, Hong Kong and Singapore -“the mobile experience bucks the global trend” and “significantly underperforms” compared with smartphone users’ Wi-Fi download experience.

On a mobile network, users in the three countries experience a slower download experience of -38.6Mb/s, 34Mb/s and 25Mb/s respectively, compared to Wi-Fi.

Australia leads

 Of all the countries analysed, smartphone users in Australia benefitted the most from using mobile over Wi-Fi, where average download speeds came in at 13Mb/s faster overall. Users in France had a 2.5Mb/s advantage, while Qatar and Turkey had an uplift of 11.8Mb/s and 7.3Mb/s respectively.

OpenSignal said newer mobile technologies, such as 4G, increased mobile network superiority.

“In 50 countries, 63 per cent of those studied, 4G networks offer a faster smartphone download experience than Wi-Fi, up from 41 per cent of countries when compared with overall mobile broadband experience instead of 4G,” said the company.

On 3G, only seven countries experienced a faster experience, and even then, the experience was modest with an increase of 3Mb/s in Lebanon.

OpenSignal added mobile technology is expected to dominate further through 5G, due to the pace of mobile innovation and the dependency of Wi-Fi experiences on fixed-network broadband deployments, “which are slow and expensive to upgrade with fibre to the premise (FTTP)”.

The report added that operators and smartphone makers must “re-evaluate their Wi-Fi strategies”, in light of the results, especially around mobile offload, automatic network selection and indoor coverage to make sure they don’t push consumer smartphones onto “Wi-Fi that offers a worse experience than the mobile network”.
Four Finnish tourists and a Zimbabwean pilot are killed when a Cessna S206 crashes in Masvingo Province, in southern Zimbabwe. Two Finnish business leaders were among the dead: Pekka Ojanpää [fi], the CE of the maintenance services and circular economy company Lassila & Tikanoja [fi], and Heikki Vappula [fi], a director of the forestry company UPM.