Wi-Fi and Internet in Vietnam

Vietnam has, in a quiet way, become one of the easiest countries on earth to stay connected in. Fibre is cheap, cafes treat wi-fi as a basic utility, and 5G now covers the main cities. The catches are minor but worth knowing before you sit down to a four-hour Zoom.

Cafe and hotel wifi

Nearly every cafe in Vietnam has free wi-fi. The password is usually written above the till or — charmingly — printed on the receipt. Speeds vary:

• Chain coffee shops (Highlands, Phuc Long, The Coffee House) — reliable 30-100 Mbps, good for calls
• Independent specialty cafes — sometimes incredible (300+ Mbps fibre), sometimes a single overloaded router
• Hotels — included free; budget places run one router for the whole building
• Co-working spaces — Toong, Dreamplex, CirCO, Cogo are the big chains and they all run business-grade lines

A speed test in your first five minutes saves the bad meeting. If the cafe wi-fi is poor, switch to the hotspot on your SIM without apology — locals do it constantly.

What is blocked

Vietnam blocks fewer things than people expect. The list, current to May 2026:

• Facebook — periodically slowed via "DPI throttling" especially around political dates, almost never fully blocked. A VPN clears it.
• Some Western news sites (BBC Vietnamese service has been blocked, RFA, Voice of America Vietnamese) — usually their Vietnamese-language pages, not the English homepages.
• Gambling and adult sites — most are blocked, ineffectively.
• Telegram — accessible.
• WhatsApp, Signal, Wire — all accessible.
• Google, YouTube, Wikipedia, Reddit, X, Instagram, TikTok — all fine.

Throttling is the bigger nuisance than outright blocks. Facebook video sometimes degrades to thumbnails. Most expats run a VPN at all times for this reason rather than for censorship.

VPNs

Vietnam does not ban VPN apps. They are openly available on the App Store and Play Store. Recommended for 2026:

Provider	Notes
Mullvad	Best for privacy, simplest pricing (€5 flat/month), no email needed
Proton VPN	Free tier is genuinely usable; paid tier excellent
NordVPN	Largest server choice, often discounted, works well from Vietnam
Cloudflare WARP	Free, fast, just a privacy layer rather than full VPN

Install before you arrive. App-store geo-locks can occasionally surface and it is easier to download things while you are still on your home network.

Home fibre for expats

If you sign a six-month lease, sort your own internet. The big three:

• Viettel — most reliable, best support. ~200,000–300,000đ/month for 200 Mbps fibre.
• FPT — fastest in most cities, slick onboarding. ~250,000đ/month for 200 Mbps. Heavy international peering, good for video calls to Europe and the US.
• VNPT — third-place but cheaper. Fine for a single user.

All require a passport copy and a Vietnamese phone number. Installation is typically next-day and free. The router they hand you is mediocre — replace it with your own if you are picky.

If your landlord includes "wifi" in the rent, ask which provider and what speed before you sign. The "free wifi" in many shared houses is a single 50 Mbps line being chewed by ten tenants.

Mobile hotspot as backup

A SIM with a 4GB/day plan turns into a perfectly serviceable office wifi for one person doing meetings and emails. Burn through 4GB and the connection throttles but does not cut. For the cost (~200k/month) it is the best insurance against the cafe wifi dying mid-call.

Some people run their entire month on hotspot alone, especially in places like Hoi An where they hop between cafes. See sim cards and mobile data for plan picks.

Public wifi safety

Cafe wifi in Vietnam is no more dangerous than anywhere else, which is to say: not very, but not zero. The usual sensible defaults:

1. VPN on for anything you would not want a stranger reading.
2. Banking apps are fine — they use their own encryption — but avoid logging into bank websites on cafe wifi when you can use the app instead.
3. Two-factor on email and money apps.

For the small number of people who care: Vietnamese ISPs do log, and there have been cases of cafe-network monitoring during political moments. None of this affects ordinary visitors or workers.

Power and reliability

Power is generally stable in major cities but brief outages happen in the rainy season. A laptop on battery rides through them. Desktop workers — consider a small UPS. Your fibre router will reboot quickly when power returns.

For a digital-nomad month in Da Nang or Hoi An: pair a Viettel hotspot SIM with a co-working day pass and you have removed all the variables. Hanoi and HCMC have so many good cafes that the SIM alone is enough.