Not very, and the town made its peace with that decades ago. There is no station. Almost nobody commutes by train, and fewer still catch a bus to work. A third of working residents simply stay at home and log on. This is not a badly connected town so much as a town organised around not needing to be.
The nearest railway station is at Axminster, which is another town's station and behaves like one. About 1% of working residents commute by train. The town lost its own line in 1965 and has spent the sixty years since being somewhere you arrive at rather than somewhere you pass through. There are 44 bus stops in the area, and fewer than 1% of people use a bus to get to work.
What actually happens on a weekday morning is this. About 44% drive. About 34% work from home. About 15% walk. Cycling accounts for about 1%. Around 15% of households have no car at all, while about 39% run two or more, which is the clearest statement of intent in the whole dataset: this is a place where the second car is more common than no car.
The Department for Transport's modelled journey times cover the area rather than any particular door, and for the town centre they are short across every mode. Six minutes by car, eight by bike, and nine either on foot or by public transport. When the bus takes exactly as long as walking, the bus is not really transport. It is a lift for the shopping.
Broadband is the part of this answer that saves the rest of it. Superfast reaches 100% of premises, and nothing at all falls below the universal service minimum. Gigabit and ultrafast both reach about 27%, so full-fibre speeds are a lottery by street rather than a given. For the third of the town working from home, the floor is solid even where the ceiling is not.
Mobile coverage is effectively universal, with at least one operator reaching 100% of the area and all operators together covering about 97%. Nobody here needs to check which network their new phone contract is on.
The everyday errands are close and the serious journeys are not. On the same modelled figures, a doctor's surgery is about six minutes away by car, on foot or by public transport. A food store is about six minutes by car and eight on foot. The nearest employment centre is about 17 minutes by car and about 45 by public transport. The hospital is the finding: about 46 minutes in a car and about 77 on public transport. That is the number to sit with before buying, particularly for anyone with a condition that involves regular appointments. The public transport times date from 2019 and services have been withdrawn across rural areas since, so treat those with more caution than the car and walk figures, which do not change unless the roads do.
The bus network itself is better than the commuting share suggests. Across the 24 stops with published service data, there are about 108 scheduled weekday departures per stop, about 8 of them in the peak hour, and every one of those stops has some weekend service. That is a genuine service rather than a token one. People here are not avoiding the bus because it does not run.
On noise, every postcode in the town sits near or above 65 decibels, the level at which the official mapping treats road noise as significant, with the loudest band present reaching 75 decibels. Rail noise does not register anywhere, for reasons the 1965 closure explains. What any individual house sounds like depends on which side of which street it faces, and no map can settle that.
For electric cars there are 7 public charge points in the area offering 12 connectors, of which 2 are rapid. Two rapid units means charging is something residents plan around rather than something they do while picking up a loaf.
Everything a person needs on a normal day sits inside ten minutes of the front door. Everything beyond that costs an hour and a car, and whether this town counts as well connected depends entirely on how often you need the second list.