This person had issues with their router loosing sync and requiring a reboot periodically, so they made a power switch that pings Google every 5 minutes and that power cycles the modem (with a 30 second down time) if it can't reach Google. (link)

Pretty ingenious and I guess if you can't reach Google, it's probably your fault, not Google's... Although, I don't remember the last time I've had to reboot my router. My guess is there's something wrong with the router or the copper lines (if they're on old ADSL).