I ended up having so much trouble with the machine that I started this thread with that I went out and bought another. I was able to test whether I had wifi using perl, as kind of a first useful thing to do with a new windows machine. I'm not done looking at this issue, but I can now test it from another platform as well. 

C:\Users\tblaz\Documents\meditations>cd
C:\Users\tblaz\Documents\meditations

C:\Users\tblaz\Documents\meditations>perl 1.lwp.pl
execution here
execution there

C:\Users\tblaz\Documents\meditations>type 1.lwp.pl
#!/usr/bin/perl
use 5.016;
use warnings;
use LWP::Online 'online';

say "execution here";
# "Is the internet working?"
die "NO INTARWWEB!!!" unless online();
say "execution there";
__END__

C:\Users\tblaz\Documents\meditations>

[download]

This seems to confirm the following.

C:\Users\tblaz\Documents\meditations>netsh interface show interface

Admin State    State          Type             Interface Name
----------------------------------------------------------------------
+---
Enabled        Connected      Dedicated        Wi-Fi


C:\Users\tblaz\Documents\meditations>

[download]
if you r program have to be portable you can have a bounch of modules handling this: X::Y::ConnectionInfo responsible to load X::Y::ConnectionInfo::Linux or X::Y::ConnectionInfo::Win32 based on the OS you are running on.

Can you say a few more words about how to create this namespace?

Again, thx all for comments,

In reply to Re^2: writing a utility to determine whether I have a working wifi connection by Aldebaran
in thread writing a utility to determine whether I have a working wifi connection by Aldebaran

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