Comment 16 for bug 311581

Well put, Devarshi

I think that what you're saying was the original intent of the bug report. Whilst it sucks that establishing a ppp link is more of a mission than it needs to be, it sucks a whole lot more that because NM can't tell that the user is in fact online, it misinforms client applications of an offline status -- changing their functionality (Firefox won't even try to get a page; Pidgin won't even let you attempt to go online, etc).
IIRC, this was why I ended up uninstalling NM (replacing with wicd). Sure there are some other work-arounds (Firefox has a config tweak, for example), but the path of least resistance was simply to give up on NM.