How to detect when networking initialized in /etc/init.d script on redhat 6

Question

I have an init.d script to start my process on boot and requires networking to be initialized. I can use utility nm-online which comes with NetworkManager package but problem will be at deployment where NW will be not installed so I have to have some other reliable option which can tell me network is set and I can connect to other server over network. I can keep trying till I get the networking up or connection is set but that will cause some other problem related to error reporting.

Here is the similar question asked for some other folk.

How to detect when networking initialized in /etc/init.d script?

wait_for_network()
{
    [ -z "${LINKDELAY}" ] && LINKDELAY=10
    $INFO "Waiting for network..."
    if [ -f /usr/sbin/nm-online ]; then
        nm-online -q --timeout=$LINKDELAY || nm-online -q -x --timeout=30
    else
        check_for_network_up $LINKDELAY || check_for_network_up 30
    fi
    [ "$?" = "0" ] && success "network startup" || failure "network startup"
    echo
}   

I was trying some other approach where I can check for route table. If network is not up, route command return zero entry but problem is I don’t know real number of route entry. It could be two on one machine where 10 on other machine.

check_for_network_up_old3() {
   let no_of_routes=`/bin/netstat -rn | wc -l`
   $INFO "netstat result $?"
   timeout=$1
   while [ "$timeout" != "0" ]; do
     let routes=`/sbin/ip route show | wc -l`
     $INFO "$routes"
     if [ $routes -gt 1 ]; then
        return 0
     fi
     timeout=$((timeout-1))
     sleep 1
     $INFO "check_for_network_up $timeout"
   done
  return 1
}