T-Mobile has great coverage and speeds in Hudson County, NJ, with most areas having widespread coverage of their flagship 5G Ultra Capacity (UC) network with download speeds of over 300mbps. However, one area of Hudson County is noticeably missing from this is southern Secaucus, basically the area of Secaucus including the Secaucus Junction station, the brand-new luxury Xchange apartment complex, Laurel Hill Park, and High Tech High School. This is how T-Mobile depicts this area on their official coverage map, full 5G UC coverage.

Yes, that's technically true. If you only look at the top of your phone, it will say "5G UC" and you could get a decent signal with 3-5 bars. However, data speeds are notoriously low. This is what happens when you try to run a speed test on T-Mobile 5G UC in the parking lot of High Tech High School.

This speed test was ran on the Z Fold4, with the latest top-of-the-line Qualcomm Snapdragon X65 modem, and yet, 290kbps download, 550kbps upload? On 5G? What year is this? These are about as slow as the capped 2G speeds you get on "fake unlimited" plans from MVNOs after you reach your high-speed data allotment. But, I'm supposed to be on Magenta Max with "truly unlimited" highest-priority LTE/5G data. Maybe the network is super congested, but if that's the case, why are Verizon and AT&T able to easily hit 50, 100, and sometimes even 200mbps in this same location, even inside the school? The only explanation is a faulty tower or something wrong with the backhaul.

I am a student at High Tech High School and lately, I've been having to deal with this full-time as their internet was down, making cellular/hotspot literally my only option for getting online during the outage. With these dial-up speeds, that was frankly not possible as most websites and apps need at least a few megabits per second to load and feel responsive. Thankfully, Verizon is nice enough to offer a free eSIM trial with 100GB of LTE/5G for 30 days, and Visible, with truly unlimited (albeit deprioritized) Verizon LTE/5G data is only $30/month. Worse yet, AT&T also offers good service in this area and even announced the construction of a new cell tower here. Both Verizon and AT&T can regularly break 50-100mbps in this location but not T-Mobile. It makes no sense to be forced to sign up for a competitor's plan just to get good service in one area while T-Mobile is the fastest everywhere else in Hudson County, being over 10x faster than Verizon in Downtown Jersey City. This could be easily fixed if T-Mobile upgraded and/or built new towers in this area, and there is no reason not to.

On top of the school, many people are moving into this area. A new luxury apartment complex and 25-story high rise are being built in the vicinity. Also, the Secaucus Junction station is already a fairly popular place for NJ Transit commuters transitioning between the Port Jervis Line (from Orange, Rockland, and Bergen Counties to Hoboken), and the Northeast Corridor lines (which connect most of the rest of NJ Transit's northern NJ service to New York Penn Station).

It is clear that the demand for better T-Mobile service in this area is apparent, especially during a school internet outage when you realize that cell service is sometimes the only option to work. With the T-Mobile network being far superior to the Verizon and AT&T networks in the rest of Hudson County, it doesn't make sense to refuse to upgrade one area's coverage, especially one in which thousands of commuters commute through, thousands of residents live, and thousands of students go to school.