How do you know if you have an internet connection? Is it enough that you can route packets to the nearest router? Perhaps the machine has only one network adapter, one gateway, and perhaps the connection to the gateway goes down, but the machine can still route to the gateway and local network?
Perhaps the machine has one network adapter and a dozen gateways; perhaps they come and go all the time, but is one of them always up?
What if the machine has several network adapters but only one gateway? Perhaps it can route some subsets of the Internet, but still has an excellent connection to a local network that is not connected to the Internet?
What should I do if multichannel network cards, several gateways are installed on the computer, but for administrative reasons, only parts of the Internet remain?
Do you really care if clients connect to your servers?
What delay between packets is acceptable? (30 ms is good, 300 ms pushes the limits of human endurance, 3,000 ms is unbearably long, 960,000 ms is what it takes to connect to a solar probe.) What packet loss is acceptable?
What are you really trying to measure?
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