Why am I getting such a short range from a new wireless router

[Joey P]

To make a long story short, I just put in a new wireless router here at work. It's a Netgear N150 WNR1000v3. It's getting almost no range at all. For example, if I stand 40 feet away from it, but still maintaining a line of sight with it, my signal drops by half. Right now, I'm about 10 feet away and my signal says Fair (as opposed to excellent). There's technically some drywall directly between me and router, but there's a doorway about 2 feet over. Getting more then 40 feet away and losing line of sight contact is sort of hit or miss. It'll bounce between fair and poor, sometimes jumping back up to excellent. But the only time I can really get excellent on a regular basis is to be within a few feet of it and even that doesn't seem to be a sure thing.

At the moment, I'm trying to decide if it's the (new) router or if it's my phone. Now, I use a similar router (same brand, might be an N300, not sure off hand) and my phone at home with less/no problems and the router is in the basement there.

I don't have any laptops to test this out but I'm going to have one employee connect her iPhone to it for a day or two and see if she drops her connection around the store. I'm also going to power cycle the router (which I didn't want to do since it'll drop the connection to our credit card machine).

Our last wireless router, I barely ever used and it was in a completely different physical location so I really can't compare it to that one. I think I'll have to pay more attention to the signal strength I'm getting when I'm at home. Maybe it's flipping back over to 4G more often then I realize. I just don't use my phone for the internet that often at home.