What causes pause when pinging?

[RGould8 at aol.com]

I've got a revolution app that does a simple

do field "runscript" as Applescript

and then that field has:

shell "ping -c 1 www.apple.com"


I then take the result and display it.   The question I have is that 
sometimes this call takes a very long time.  (15-20 seconds).   Part of the 
reason I'm doing this ping is to see if the network is active and that the 
user can reach the outside world.   (perhaps there's a better way to do 
this?)   If the user's network isn't up, then I would expect the ping to come 
back with "unknown server" quite quickly.   I'm wondering if the delay is due 
to the ping-command when launching from Unix, because I notice that sometimes 
the terminal window freezes for a bit until the ping response comes back.   
Is there a way to kind of "off-load" this ping process and permit Revolution 
to churn on other things, or is it stuck because I'm launching this via 
Applescript?   If so, will the new Rev 2.0 solve this problem via the shell 
command that works on OS X?
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