Not well, unless the connection you care about is broadband. Seaton has no railway station and never replaced the branch line it lost. More than half of working residents drive to work. Almost nobody commutes by bus or train. The town is wired for the twenty-first century and routed for the nineteenth.
There is no station in the town, and the commuting record reflects it: under 1% of working residents travel to work by train. Buses are present rather than persuasive. There are 43 bus stops across the area, and 1% of residents use one to get to work.
What the town actually does is drive. Around 54% of working residents commute by car, 21% work from home, 15% walk and 2% cycle. About 15% of households have no car at all, while 33% run two or more, which is the split you get in a place where the shops are walkable but the jobs are not. Anyone arriving without a driving licence should understand what they are signing up for before the removal van books itself.
The Department for Transport's journey-time statistics put the nearest town centre 8 minutes away by car, 10 by bicycle, 13 by public transport and 16 on foot. Those are modelled for the area as a whole rather than measured from any particular front door, but the shape of them is the useful part: the centre of things is close enough to walk to, which is more than most Devon coastal towns manage.
The same modelling puts a doctor's surgery about 9 minutes away on foot, 8 by public transport and 7 by car, and a food store about 9 minutes on foot or 7 by car. The nearest hospital is a different proposition altogether at 52 minutes by car and 71 by public transport. The nearest employment centre is 15 minutes by car and 46 by public transport. Those journey times date from 2019, and while the distance to a fixed building does not change, the public transport figures should be treated with more caution than the driving and walking ones, because services get withdrawn and timetables do not grow back.
Current bus provision is the number worth staring at. Across the 41 stops with published service data, the average is 32 scheduled departures on a weekday, and every one of those stops has some weekend service, which is genuinely unusual for a rural district. At peak time, though, the average stop sees 0.7 buses in the hour, which is less than one. A stop is not a service, and a timetable that averages under a bus an hour in the morning rush is not a commuting option, whatever the map suggests.
Broadband is where the town quietly outperforms. Superfast reaches every premise in the area, gigabit-capable connections reach 52%, and nothing at all falls below the universal service obligation. For the 21% working from home, that combination matters more than any bus timetable ever will.
Mobile coverage holds up too. At least one operator reaches effectively the whole area at 100%, and all operators together cover 97%, so the dead-spot problem that plagues rural Devon is mostly somebody else's.
Electric cars are the gap. The area has one public charge point with two connectors, and none of them is rapid. Charging here is a thing you plan around overnight at home rather than something you do while picking up a loaf, and anyone buying an electric car for a Seaton driveway should check they have a driveway first.
One more thing the brochures skip: on the official noise mapping, all of the town's postcodes sit near or above the 65-decibel threshold at which road noise is treated as significant, with the loudest band present reaching 75 decibels. That is a mapping outcome for a compact town with a main road through it rather than a prediction about any particular bedroom window.
Connectivity is the weakest part of the case for living here. The broadband is excellent and the walk to the shops is short, but the rest of it comes down to a car, a full tank and the acceptance that the hospital is the better part of an hour away.