3 ms·

Not really. It can ping whatever resource it needs "the internet" for in the first place. After all, if that's down, then no amount of "internet" connectivity w

• rtkwe 8y ago
  When it's connecting to a wifi access point your phone or device doesn't know what resource you'll actually request so instead it pings the most resilient thing a Google engineer could think of at the time without risking DDoSing someone which is Google.
  • KeepFlying 8y ago
    We are talking about smart home things here though, which usually depend on their own services anyway. This is more of a problem with things like Windows reaching out to msftconnecttest.com or some other generic internet service. But in the case of a smart home device it's needs are usually more well defined. This becomes harder with a consumer router trying to determine if it is online though unfortunately because of exactly what you describe.
• shados 8y ago
  If you're trying to figure out if a failure is from the service you're trying to hit, or if it's the connection of the current device, you need to hit a separate, third resource. To be resilient/fast enough, for most product you'd probably hit a static file on a well known CDN. If you work at google, google.com is honestly not a bad idea. If you just try to ping the resource you were going to access, for all you know it's the resource that's down.