You might have seen the recent project on network speed testing on a Raspberry Pi which tweets to Comcast when the speed goes below 50 Mbps. This is an alternative or complementary option.

The Raspberry Pi software is installed as a Debian package. The data is displayed on a dashboard. You can receive alerts by email when the connection goes down, the Ping packet loss goes above x%, you can't access Facebook, or can't resolve times.com. No tweeting capabilities though.