Cacti and squid might be useful in this case. In Cacti, you must be able to interpret the graph of usage. To do so, start downloading any torrent which might take a whole day and start cacti to monitor the usage, wherever you see a drop or red spikes, internet is down.
Do make sure that your firewall is allowed for ICMP [ping ] packets to go through. When you are able to ping google,
using ping will also work, provided you write a small script leading to:
ping -c 2
www.google.com
if [$? != 0] then
echo `date +%F%T` >> /tmp/loggingfile
echo \e "\nnet is down\n------\n" >> /tmp/loggingfile
fi
elsif sleep 30
Reiterate the script for every 30 secs. I forgot shell scripting long back. But I hope you get the idea.