The best-connected thing in Milford on Sea is the broadband. Just over eight in ten homes can reach gigabit internet. Fewer than one in a hundred residents commute by train. Nearly four in ten work from home. This is a village that solved its transport problem by quietly deciding it had nowhere it needed to be.
Start with the trains, because there aren't any. Milford on Sea has no railway station of its own. The nearest platforms sit in the surrounding towns: New Milton, Sway, and the two Lymington stops at Lymington Town and Lymington Pier, each of them a drive away before the journey has properly started. The commute figures show exactly how much that gets used. Fewer than one in a hundred people here travel to work by train, and barely more take the bus, despite roughly two dozen bus stops scattered around the parish. The stops exist. The service behind them is more a matter of faith. In a village where a good share of residents have finished with the daily rush hour for good, low numbers like these are less a failing than a description of who lives here.
Where the place genuinely delivers is the connection that does not require leaving the house. Just over eight in ten homes can get gigabit broadband, and every home in the village can reach superfast speeds. For a coastal settlement at the far end of the line, that is a standard of digital infrastructure that quietly embarrasses places with far better roads. If your commute is a walk to the laptop, you are living somewhere close to ideal, and the work-from-home numbers suggest plenty of people have worked that out already.
For everyone else, the car is not a convenience but the entire system. Half of working residents drive to work. The nearest town centre is around 13 minutes away by car, or closer to 24 by public transport, which tells you all you need to know about which one people actually choose. Walking and cycling barely register in the commute figures, which is what you would expect of somewhere strung out along a coast road rather than clustered round a station. Owning a car here is less a lifestyle choice than a condition of entry, and running two of them is the local default rather than the exception.
So the honest answer sits right on the fence. Milford on Sea is superbly wired and modestly served, excellent if your world fits down a broadband line and tiresome the moment it needs a timetable. Buy here for the sea and the fibre, not for the connections onward.