Fair Oak is decently connected by car and barely connected by train. There is no station in the village itself, so the railway hardly features in how people get to work, with only about one in two hundred commuting by train. Just over half drive. More than a third do not commute at all, working from home instead. This is a car-and-broadband village, not a rail-and-bus one, and it does not pretend otherwise.
On rail, the nearest options all sit outside the village, at Eastleigh, Chandlers Ford, Hedge End and Botley, each a drive rather than a walk, with Southampton Airport Parkway also within reach for longer trips. The train barely shows up in the commuting numbers because of that gap, and the buses do not fill it: only around one in ninety residents commutes by bus, despite roughly 50 bus stops scattered across the area. The stops exist, the service is light, and most people vote with their car keys.
Where Fair Oak pulls ahead is the broadband. Roughly eight in ten homes can get a gigabit-capable line, and nearly every address can reach superfast speeds, with effectively none stuck below the basic universal minimum. For a village that struggles to put you on a train, it will happily put you on a video call, which is a large part of why so many residents work from a spare room.
For a typical journey, the car does the heavy lifting. A run to the nearest town centre takes something like 15 minutes by car and closer to 22 by public transport, which tells you most of the story about which one people choose. Onward trips to a larger city or to London mean driving to one of those outer stations first and taking a direct train from there. It works, but it asks for a car at the start of almost every journey that leaves the village.
The verdict is middling and honest: strong broadband, weak public transport, and a heavy dependence on the car in between. Fair Oak connects you to the internet far better than it connects you to a railway, and how well connected it feels will come down entirely to whether you are content to drive.