Connection Status Widget for Web Page

I'm working on an Ajax-heavy web app, and we're getting complaints of flaky behavior in situations where the user has an iffy network connection. As a first step in dealing with the issue, we'd like to add a network status widget to the top right corner of the affected pages.

The simplest version would be to have a script ping the server via Ajax every n seconds and show a green light/red light depending on whether or not it succeeded; that should be pretty easy to implement. However, is there an available widget that does something like this, possibly with a more sophisticated or informative approach? My initial Google searches haven't turned up anything, so I'm checking in here to see if anybody knows of any good existing solutions to this problem.

Some links that might help.

• Detect that the Internet connection is offline? This question might prove helpful if you decide on creating your own or it might have the answer outright. There are many helpful answers.
• How to Detect if Your Server Is Down When Making jQuery Ajax Calls - Might also prove helpful for a homegrown solution.
• Check if Internet Connection Exists with Javascript? - More good suggestions for a simple AJAX solution.
• Detecting offline status in HTML 5 - might be helpful.

Based on my findings I think your simple AJAX solution described in the question would work best. I didn't see any established widgets out there. Nevertheless, I would still review some of the suggestions/answers in the links as there were many clever solutions for different situations.