Three Mile Cross has better connections to the internet than to anywhere you'd need to physically go. Half the workforce doesn't leave the house for work. Most of the rest drive. Hardly anyone takes the train. The fibre handles most of the commuting here, and the car does the rest.
For rail, the stations named for the area include Reading Rail Station, Reading Green Park, Reading West, Earley and Mortimer. At the 2021 census, about 1% of working residents commuted by train. Buses serve eight stops in the area, and about 1% of workers commuted by bus. Having five stations to choose from sounds generous. Barely anyone here uses any of them to get to work.
The way people get to work explains it. About 51% worked mainly from home at the census, and about 41% drove. Walking accounts for about 2%, and cycling for less than 1%. About 4% of households have no car, while about 57% have two or more. That's how a village gets organised when the home office is upstairs and the second car is for everything else. Nobody chose Three Mile Cross for the rail link, and the commuting figures reflect that.
Broadband is the reason working from home is so common here. Gigabit-capable connections reach about 93% of premises, and superfast reaches about 99%. No premises fall below the universal service minimum. For a village, that's better than plenty of town centres, and it's what makes working from home here a plan rather than a compromise.
Mobile coverage is complete: 100% of the area gets 4G or 5G from at least one operator, and 100% from all of them. Whichever network your contract is with, it'll work here.
In practice, a typical week here means a laptop on most days and a drive on the others. Anyone whose job needs them at a desk somewhere else five days a week should work out that route before buying, because the numbers above suggest most residents avoided that kind of job.
The buses are more useful than the census figures suggest. Among the six stops with timetable data, each averages about 80 scheduled weekday departures, roughly four an hour at peak, and 100% of them have some weekend service. That's a real bus service, not two buses a day. The low bus figure at the census says less about the timetable than about how many drives in the village hold two cars.
Traffic is also noisy here. Every postcode in the area, 100% of them, sits near or above 65 decibels of road noise. That's the level at which official noise mapping treats road noise as significant, and the loudest band present reaches 75 decibels. Rail noise doesn't reach that threshold at any postcode. How loud it is inside a particular house depends on glazing, which way it faces and how far it sits from the road, so listen with the windows open at a viewing before you listen to an estate agent.
Three Mile Cross is middling for connections: very good online, fine by bus, and dependent on the car for almost everything else.