Well enough that two in five residents work from home and don't need to test it. Direct trains to London. 1,352 bus stops across the area. Nearly nine in ten postcodes get gigabit broadband. The fibre is quicker than the traffic.
The rail picture is dense by south-coast standards. Brighton Rail Station is the main terminus and sits at the base of the town, with London Road (Brighton) Rail Station, Preston Park Rail Station, Moulsecoomb Rail Station and Falmer Rail Station strung along the lines running north and east. Hove Rail Station and Portslade Rail Station serve the western half of the wider urban area, while Aldrington Rail Station, Fishersgate Rail Station, Southwick Rail Station and Shoreham-by-Sea Rail Station carry the westward coastal traffic. Lewes Rail Station and Cooksbridge Rail Station open the route north-east. Direct trains reach London and the Sussex coast in both directions. Only about one in forty residents commutes by train, which sounds low until you notice that two in five no longer commute at all.
The bus network is where the real municipal work happens. There are 1,352 bus stops across the area, and roughly one in fourteen residents commutes by bus, which is a proportionally higher share than most seaside cities manage. Buses run late into the night on the main corridors, which is the kind of infrastructure that quietly subsidises a lot of Friday-night decisions and saves a lot of Saturday-morning taxi fares. About one in seven residents walks to work, and roughly one in twenty-eight cycles, which is what happens in a compact city with a working seafront and dense pedestrian streets.
The broadband picture is essentially settled. Nearly nine in ten postcodes get gigabit fibre, roughly nine in ten get ultrafast, and virtually every home gets superfast. There is no rural-copper problem to solve because there is barely any rural-copper left. Zero postcodes fall below the Universal Service Obligation floor, which is the tier at which the regulator has to step in. Mobile signal is the same story: every location gets four or five bars from at least one operator, and virtually every location gets it from every operator. If a home is not connected here, the reason is contractual rather than technical.
The daily journey shows the mix in action. A typical trip to the town centre runs about eleven minutes by car, sixteen minutes by cycle, twenty-one minutes by public transport, and thirty-five on foot. About a quarter of residents drive to work, one in seven walks, and two in five stay home. That share driving is a function of pricing rather than virtue: parking is expensive, tight and enforced, and the buses and trains are close enough that the car sits on the driveway most weekdays. That is the local balance: driving works, but the alternatives work better for enough people that they use them.
The connectivity here is above average and the numbers know it. Four out of five on the composite score, four out of five in daily practice, and the only real weak point is a rail commute share that is small because it does not need to be big.