Utility to monitor internet connectivity?

I live in an apartment complex which advertises a "free high-speed internet connection"... but it's really not high-speed at all, and often not even a connection. That is, it's frequently the case that I can't access anything on the internet from my computer. I can still get to my router's admin page so I know it's not a case of my computer dropping its network connection entirely; the problem definitely appears to be out of my control.

I'd like to complain to the management about it (they're probably not going to do anything, but still, couldn't hurt), and it'd be nice to take some statistics about the internet connectivity to back up my case. I did put together a little script to collect some data by pinging a known IP address every 5 minutes, but I'm curious, is there a more full-featured program out there that's designed for this? I use KDE on Linux primarily, but not exclusively, so answers for any OS are welcome.

Your current plan of pinging every 5 minutes is a pretty good one. I'd take it one step further and look into making pretty graphs with something like Munin. Munin runs every 5 minutes and collects stats on your system, then plots them with RRDTool. Adding a plugin to ping a known site should be a trivial task (my Munin instance even tracks my cable modem).