I have lived in South East Asia since 2004. I did a brief stint in Malaysia and Singapore, but then spent more than a decade in Thailand and in a few days I will have been in Vietnam for a year. I constantly compare the pros and cons of both places, more for fun than anything else. I'm not trying to hurt anyone's feeling or tell anyone what's what.
Also, I have not lived everywhere in both countries so I can't say for sure if the things I have experienced in either is as widespread as I believe it to be. For the sake of accuracy, I will mostly only compare Chiang Mai and Da Nang because both of them are relatively large cities with a population of around 1 million people each. It would be unfair to compare Hanoi (population around 9 million) with Krabi (population 40,000), for example.
So here we go!
Electricity
Before I left the United States, I can't really recall any instances in which the power went out. Sure our alarm clocks had a little 9 volt battery slot in there for the times that the power would flash, but this was so rare the if you bought one 9-volt, it was probably going to last a lot longer than the digital clock did.
In Thailand, the power flashes and fluctuates constantly. This can be very bad for electronics and plenty of people have found this out the hard way when their $1500 computer just doesn't work anymore because the amps or volts or whatever was so unreliable. The power would also frequently flash of and on, so playing PS4 or a computer game better have a UPS (Uninterruptible power supply) attached to it or you are going to have unintended shutdowns on a regular basis. On one occasion this happened to me on Witcher 3 during one of those times that you are not supposed to power down your system and when I got back in the data had been corrupted and I am one of those guys that only uses one save file. I had to start the game over - which I did not do. Thailand's power regularly goes out for many hours at a time, with no warning ahead of time and no explanation provided by the electric company. When you try to call the call center, they don't even answer the phone.
In Vietnam, and I have only been here a year, the power has never flashed, and there have only been two outages - and both of them were scheduled outages that we were all made aware of well before they happened. These were annoying because they lasted all day so if you work online like me, you had to go to a cafe that has a generator. But then I found out that I am actually a lot more productive in public than I am in my home office.
It seems to me that Vietnam does a better job with maintenance and Thailand fixes something once it breaks
Winner: Vietnam
Water services
I'm going to include all household water services in this part of the list including what happens to the water once you put it down the drain or flush the toilet in this.
Both countries faucets do not have potable water coming from the taps and if you do want to drink the water you need to have a filtration machine and even then I don't really trust those things. Most people just have a water bottle delivery system and this is really inexpensive to the point of being irrelevant.
The water that comes out of your tap you use for washing stuff and flushing toilets. Unfortunately for Thailand, providing enough pressure for the entire community isn't something that happens in very many areas and most places will have some sort of reserve tank system for when the water pressure drops. If you can not afford one of these machines and the pumps associated with them, you are shit outta luck when the water pressure drops. Most people keep a big bucket of water in the bathrooms for when this occurs in order to shower and flush the toilet.
Vietnam also has this problem, but to a much lower degree. They seem to put a bit more emphasis on having enough water pressure for the community that they are serving. Most condos here have reserve tanks, but private separate residences do not. From the few people I know that live in houses there have been very few instances where they didn't have water for any prolonged period of time although the pressure would drop.
Both countries cost of water (in your water bill) is extremely low.
Thailand also has a rather abyssmal track record as far as dealing with wastewater is concerned. In multiple houses I lived in you could hear it simply pouring out of households into the regular rainwater drainage systems. Some of my washing machines, by design, just poured out of the house onto the ground behind the building. In the 3 cities I lived in, there was also no sewerage system but rather, every house and building had massive septic tanks that had to be pumped from time-to-time. God only knows what they do with that when they cart it away in the poo-poo truck.
Vietnam has both waste-water collection and central sewerage systems installed underground for municipal areas. I can not speak for the rural areas but I presume that it is not the case there.
Winner: Vietnam
Internet
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There was a time when this was not considered a utility but go ahead and try to imagine your life without it for a second: Most of us probably couldn't do it.
The ISP's in Thailand are mostly private industries and they compete with one another on price, service, and overall speed. I presume that this is the case in Vietnam as well but I hear considerably less talk about one being better than the other like I did in Thailand. To be fair I lived in Thailand significantly longer.
4G is everywhere in both countries, but in Thailand it was so lightning fast that for the most part it was faster than your Wifi in your house was anyway. There have been times here in Vietnam that I have gotten so frustrated with the speed of my condo's ISP that I switch over and tether off of my phone instead and it is usually much faster.
When you look around Thailand you wouldn't guess that it has extremely fast internet, much faster than the USA in-fact, but it does and I believe that Vietnam can probably say that as well. However, there is one big difference between Thailand and Vietnam and that is reliable connection: The connection drops quite a lot in Vietnam and for someone like me that is really fussy about that sort of thing, this is unacceptable. While this on occasion would happen in Thailand as well, it was extremely rare whereas in Vietnam it is something I can expect to have happen multiple times a week.
While this is a close race between the two countries I am going to give a slight edge to Thailand on this one and while I can not be sure, I am guessing this is because there is so much competition between the various companies that they are forced to continually evolve and provide great service lest their customers migrate over to a different company.
Winner: Thailand
Overall winner: Vietnam
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So there you have it folks! Basically Vietnam does a lot better as far as overall utilities are concerned and I'll admit that the internet thing was a close one and my decision to award it to Thailand was based at least a little bit on not wanting to give all the awards to one country. There simply seems to be a much bigger dedication to prevention rather than repair here and from what I have seen the planning process is just a lot better.
Both countries are really inexpensive to live in and utilities, generally speaking cost a fraction of what they cost back in the West. Therefore, I am more than willing to deal with the occasional issues that occur when the alternative is to be paying 10x as much for them (all but internet) back in USA.
Vietnam indeed is great place to be in, most Asian countries are economically sound and even internet services in my country are quite pocket friendly.
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