Robert R. Fenichel

How to Verify that One's Internet Connection is Working

Verifying that one's Internet connection is working is not perfectly straightforward.  One can try pinging one's ISP, but not all hosts deign to respond to pings.  Also, my ISP has occasionally been able to communicate with its clients but — as far as I can tell — with nobody else, so even if it did respond to pings, one might still be unable to access the wider Internet.  Finally, even hosts that do respond to pings do not consider this task important, so per-host response rates are typically in the 80-90% range.

The strategy I use is to to pick 4 or 5 sites that do (usually) respond to pings.  Then, at intervals of 30 seconds or so, I go down the list, pinging each site until one of them responds.  If none of the sites on my list responds, I consider my Internet connection to be inactive.  The chance that I have a good connection even though none of the selected sites responds is typically <0.001%.

 This strategy is embodied in a program that I run whenever I run my computer; it generates logs and datasets that I may someday need in negotiation with my ISP.

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Page revised: 03/13/2007 14:36