Better than you'd expect from a town at the end of the line. Nearly every home can get fast broadband. Buses run often and keep running at weekends. Half of commuters drive. Hardly anyone takes the train to work. Dover connects best to itself, and that suits most of the people who live here.
Dover Priory is the main station, with Kearsney on the northern edge and Martin Mill, Shepherds Well and Walmer spread across the surrounding villages. At the 2021 census only about 2% of workers commuted by train. Buses carried about 4%, from 246 stops across the area. For a town whose whole identity is being a crossing point, remarkably few residents cross anything on the way to work.
The Census commute mix tells the real story. About 52% of workers drove, 19% worked from home and 13% walked. Cycling managed about 1%, which is what happens when you build a town in a valley and put half of it up the sides. About 29% of households have no car, and 28% have two or more, so the town divides fairly neatly into people who walk everywhere and people who own a driveway's worth of vehicles.
The Department for Transport's journey-time statistics model the trip to the nearest town centre at about 9 minutes by car, 13 by bike, 16 by public transport and 23 on foot. These are modelled figures for the area, not a route from any particular front door. A 23-minute walk into town is fine on a dry Tuesday and a different proposition coming back uphill with the shopping.
The same statistics put a GP about 7 minutes away by car, 10 by public transport and 12 on foot, and a food shop about 7 minutes by car or 8 on foot. The hospital is the outlier: about 32 minutes by car and 50 by public transport. Employment sits about 9 minutes away by car but 34 by public transport. The public transport times date from 2019 and services have changed since, so trust the car and walking figures more.
The buses themselves are a real service rather than a stop with a timetable and a prayer. Each stop averages about 71 departures on a weekday, around 5 an hour at peak, and 95% of stops have some weekend service. Those figures are current, unlike the modelled journey times, and they explain why a third of households can manage without a car.
Gigabit broadband reaches about 78% of premises, with superfast available to 98%. The share stuck below the minimum legal standard rounds to nothing. For anyone working from home, the broadband is the most dependable connection the town has.
Mobile coverage is close to complete: 4G or 5G from at least one operator reaches 100% of the area and from every operator about 99%. Picking a network here is a matter of price, not signal.
The price of all that road access is noise. About 84% of postcodes sit near or above 65 decibels of road noise, the level official noise mapping treats as significant, and the loudest band present reaches 75 decibels. Rail noise at that level affects about 1% of postcodes. That says nothing about how any particular bedroom will sound, but it's a good reason to stand outside a house at rush hour before making an offer.
There are 18 public charge points in the area with 51 connectors between them, 6 of them rapid. With so few rapid units, electric-car owners without a driveway will be planning their charging rather than doing it while they shop.
For a typical resident, that adds up to short drives, frequent buses, broadband that works and a hospital trip that needs planning. Dover is better connected than most people assume, stronger on everyday journeys and wiring than on getting anywhere far away.