Middling, and the reason is geography: Hythe sits on the wrong side of the water from the city it spends all day looking at. There is no railway station in the town, so barely anyone commutes by train, fewer than one in a hundred residents. Most people drive, about 55% of them, and close to three in ten now work from home and skip the commute altogether. The broadband, on the other hand, is genuinely strong. This is a place that connects you to the internet faster than it connects you to a platform.
The rail situation is defined by absence. The nearest usable stations sit a drive away, Totton on the same side of the water and Southampton Central across it, which is why the train-commuting figure is a rounding error rather than a routine. Buses carry more of the load, with around fifty stops scattered across the town and the villages near it, though even they move only a small share of commuters, closer to one in seventy. The pier and its ferry across Southampton Water are the town's most characterful link to the city, a working crossing rather than a novelty, even if the numbers show most people still reach for the car keys first.
On the digital side the picture flips. Gigabit-capable broadband reaches about nine in ten homes, and faster-than-standard service covers effectively the whole town. For anyone whose job travels down a cable rather than a road, Hythe is as connected as anywhere, which is a large part of why the work-from-home share sits as high as it does.
In day-to-day terms that adds up to a car-first town with a decent escape hatch. If your life runs on driving, with the occasional ferry hop into the city, it works cleanly. If it depends on stepping onto a train at the end of your road, it does not, and you will fold the drive to the nearest station into your morning whether you planned to or not.
The verdict is fair-to-middling and honest about it: Hythe is well wired and poorly tracked. Come for the fibre and the ferry, not for the fast train it does not have.