So you can only say, you have a connection to a server in internet and this mean you have internet. You can start a request to google or your own homepage or a ping to a known server (as Curt say) or read a ntp for time,...
So its your choice to say: I have internet, because xxx work.
Agreed.
However....
- The particular server may go down or lose its connection
- If google, it has gone down before, but that is rare...
- The server your website is on might go down or lose its connection
- The server you were pinging might go down, lose its connection, or be reconfigured to stop accepting pings
- NTP, same as point #1
What really matters is the Internet resources your app needs to connect to.
However...
- Are you accessing by address? What happens if the address changes?
- Is the DNS round robin? Are you caching name lookups? What happens if you get a stale one?
- What happens if your access to DNS is interrupted or the DNS you use goes down?
So, what does it mean to have an
"Internet connection"?
If I can't access DNS correctly but I can connect to sites by address, does that mean I have an
"Internet connection"?
If I can use DNS and can access some sites, but not the one I'm checking on or need, does that mean I do not have an
"Internet connection"?
True, OP Nicole does not need to know all that is involved or have a deep understanding of DNS, routers, firewalls, gateways, NAT, VPN, proxies, etc...
But OP Nicole needs to establish what an
"Internet connection" means for said application, and go from there...