Checking status of a dial up connection

Question

I'm trying to develop a program that checks whether a dial up connection has been established. I'm using a thread to attempt to open a URLConnection every 5 seconds.
If opening the connection succeeds the connection status is set to true. If an exception occurs the status is set to false. In general this approach works fine, with one exception.
If I start the thread with a dial-up connection established the thread sets the status to true. When the dial up is then disconnected it sets it to false. This is just what I need.
However if I start the thread the status is set to false and stays that way even when the dial up has been established. It's very strange that the method works fine one way and doen't work at all another way. If anyone can clear this up i'd appreciate it
Here's the code
import java.io.*;
import java.net.*;
public class ConnectionStatusThread extends Thread
     public static boolean INTERNET_CONNECTED = false;
     public ConnectionStatusThread( String name )
          super( name );
     public void run()
          System.out.println( "ConnectionStatus Thread Running" );
          while ( !Thread.interrupted() )
               URL gfr = null;
               URLConnection conn = null;
               try
                    gfr = new URL( "http://www.goodfridayrobotics.com/" );
               catch ( MalformedURLException meu )
                    System.err.println( meu.getMessage() );
               try
                    conn = gfr.openConnection();
                    conn.connect();
                    INTERNET_CONNECTED = true;
               catch( IOException ioe )
                    INTERNET_CONNECTED = false;
               System.out.println( "Connected = " + INTERNET_CONNECTED );     
               //conn = null; doesn't make any difference if set to null
               //gfr = null;
               try
                    Thread.sleep(5000);
               catch(InterruptedException e)
                    System.err.println( "InterruptedException" );
                    System.err.println( e.getMessage() );
}

Answer 1

It's ok everyone I changed the URL + URLConnection to a socket and that solved the problem