Utilities
In urban areas you will find electricity, mains water & telecommunications but once you move away from built up areas you may that 1 or more may not be available and it will depend where you intend to live. I will begin with urban areas but most of what I address here is the same just about everywhere in the Issan region.
Electricity
Electricity is 220 volts, 50 cycles/sec and generally reliable. You may find, in rural areas where there are perhaps more than 200 houses in a village the power seems to vary (we get this quite a lot and just about every day). As far as I know it simply means not enough power is being supplied and can be remedied by proving to the energy supplier the fluctuations in power over a period of time.
Thunder storms invariable knock the power system off for a short time (30-60 minutes on average) but thankfully this is not that common. Older houses have wall sockets for 2 pin plugs but newer houses are being built with 3 pin sockets. Not that it makes a huge difference as it is still hard to find a decent 3 pin plug in the Udon area. So if you bring an electrical appliance from the UK (and it almost certainly will be with 3 cables, live, neutral & earth) make sure you bring some 3 pin plugs and spare fuses with you in case you need to change something.
Just about all electrical cables are run between poles adjacent to the roads, you will see them everywhere and many look a real mess (certainly inner city ones do. I have seen traffic accidents that end up with knocking out one of these poles and the electricity supply was wiped out in a huge area for the best part of 5 hours.
Thunder storms invariable knock the power system off for a short time (30-60 minutes on average) but thankfully this is not that common. Older houses have wall sockets for 2 pin plugs but newer houses are being built with 3 pin sockets. Not that it makes a huge difference as it is still hard to find a decent 3 pin plug in the Udon area. So if you bring an electrical appliance from the UK (and it almost certainly will be with 3 cables, live, neutral & earth) make sure you bring some 3 pin plugs and spare fuses with you in case you need to change something.
Just about all electrical cables are run between poles adjacent to the roads, you will see them everywhere and many look a real mess (certainly inner city ones do. I have seen traffic accidents that end up with knocking out one of these poles and the electricity supply was wiped out in a huge area for the best part of 5 hours.
Water
Water is normally supplied via water mains by the government but from our experience it is not that reliable if you live away from the city center of Udon Thani. It appears that when they lay "service" pipes to individual properties what they actually do is run a 1" pipe to serve a number of houses. This can lead to vastly reduced water flows if a few people are running the water at the same time and if you are near the furthest end of the water supply there will be times when you will get no water at all. I have never tried to drink the water that is supplied by the water mains as I cannot imagine the water quality is safe enough to do so, so it's bottled water (which is cheap) for drinking only. One other thing to bare in mind with water supplied in villages, it may not be available 24/7 in some cases and you will need to have some storage to use it as and when you want to. To be honest, installing some storage is a pretty good idea regardless of where you live, you just never know when you might need it. Road works can also play havoc with water distribution as the pipes are rarely laid much deeper than a few inches, and are easily smashed in excavations and can take days to be repaired.
Telecommunications
Telephone & Internet lines are normally very good and perhaps the most reliable although we have experienced problems with out ISP where the servers are knocked out of action for no apparent reason (i.e. - no thunder storms in the area). We do sometimes experience very slow download speeds though and if you are trying to use Skype or similar to webcam to Europe or USA you may not get sufficient bandwidth to be able to use the webcam properly. 10mb broadband is currently being offered (as of October 2012) so the Thai's are trying to keep up to date in this respect but there's still a long way to go. Despite the apparent low income of the region mobile phones are everywhere but the signal strengths can be very poor in rural areas, not unlike the remote parts of the UK I guess.
Rural areas
In rural areas there is still electricity and broadband available in most areas however, depending on where your house is and in relation to other houses in a village you may not get mains water. If this is the case you may need to create a well or even a bore hole. Having a bore hole drilled is not expensive though and can be done in just a few hours. You will of course need to pump the water in to tanks to store the water, then pump it in to the house. There are areas where the water will taste of salt and this can be a real headache to get rid of. The water filters available will not do the job so unless you can find a water source that does not contain salt you could be stuck with it. If you do have salty water avoid using any kind of metal couplings or adapter connections as these will be destroyed by the salt very quickly.