Badly, unless the connection in question is fibre. Half the households run two cars or more. About a third of workers commute as far as the spare room. Buses turn up, without urgency. Chudleigh is superbly connected to the internet and loosely attached to everywhere else.
Rail plays no part in daily life here. The share of residents who travel to work by train rounds to zero on the 2021 Census, and no station serves the town itself. Buses do exist: 11 stops in the area carry scheduled services, and about 1% of residents use one to get to work.
The commute mix tells the real story. About 54% drive, about 32% work from home, about 7% walk and about 1% cycle. Around 50% of households keep two cars or more, while about 11% have none at all, and that 11% is doing something considerably more difficult than the other 89% realise.
The Department for Transport's modelled journey times put the nearest town centre about 20 minutes away by car, about 47 by public transport, about 42 by bicycle and about 117 minutes on foot. These are modelled figures for the area rather than a route from any particular front door, but the walking number is not a rounding artefact. Nearly two hours to the nearest town centre is the finding, not a footnote to it.
Broadband is where the town wins. Gigabit-capable service reaches about 92% of premises, superfast reaches all of them, and no address falls below the universal service obligation. Mobile coverage from at least one operator sits at about 100%, with all operators reaching about 97%, which is better than most rural Devon manages.
For everyday destinations, the same Department for Transport modelling puts the nearest general practice about 13 minutes away by car, about 26 by public transport and about 73 on foot. The nearest hospital is about 26 minutes by car and about 55 by public transport. A food store is about eight minutes by car or about 19 on foot, which is the one genuinely walkable errand in the set. The nearest employment centre comes out at about 13 minutes by car and about 19 by public transport. Distances to fixed destinations hold up over time, but the public transport times date from 2019 and services have been cut across rural England since, so treat those minutes as the optimistic version.
Current bus figures are more useful than modelled ones. The 11 stops with service data average about 27 scheduled departures each on a weekday, weekend service reaches ten of the eleven, and at peak the average works out at about one bus an hour. A stop on a pole is not a bus service. Departures are, and about one an hour at the busiest point of the day is the difference between choosing the bus and enduring it.
Road noise is the price of being on a route everyone drives. All of the town's postcodes sit near or above 65 decibels, the level at which official noise mapping treats road noise as significant, and the loudest band mapped locally reaches 75 decibels. Rail noise does not feature at all, which follows from there being no railway. Where an individual house sits in that range depends entirely on its position, so listen at the kerb before the second viewing rather than after the survey.
Electric vehicles are catered for in the narrowest sense. There is one public charge point in the area with three connectors, one of which is rapid. That makes charging something to plan around rather than something done incidentally while picking up milk, and anyone buying an electric car here should be planning on a home charger.
Connectivity is the weakest part of the case for living in Chudleigh. Superb broadband bolted onto a transport network that quietly assumes everybody has a car, a licence and no strong feelings about either.