funny that you mention it but most technically minded Germans I know (maybe outside of people spending their days with datacenter stuff) habitually use `ping he

funny that you mention it but most technically minded Germans I know (maybe outside of people spending their days with datacenter stuff) habitually use `ping heise.de` (of c't and ix print magazine fame), which seems to have been a thing since the 90s. It's usually fast, you can really count on it being up and still around. I even remember them once writing about having such an unusually high volume of ICMP traffic that they had to divert that traffic to a dedicated box at some point.