I recently had Sky Broadband installed. Why is my connection so slow?

The local exchange is very far away, and I live in the middle of nowhere, so all that's available to me is a 1.5 mb connection. It's a fair deal for the tranquility of the country I suppose. I had Tiscali before, and averaged about 160 kbps on a file download. I installed Sky, which was said to be the same speed as my Tiscali connection, but my download speeds are dropping as low as 2 kbps. Web pages take an eternity. Should I be giving Sky an ear-bashing? Is this something others have experienced? I'll be damned if I'm gonna accept 2 kbps downloads again... this isn't 1997 on friggin' dial up. Thanks in advance.