I read that as his ISP uses traffic shaping - so bittorrent connections are uniformly throttled (when when the content is completely legal) yet VPN is not. So he tunnels his torrents through VPN.

I have the same annoying problems - particularly as I like to offer up my bandwidth for Linux ISOs and creative commons works (I don't always contribute money to these projects (wife+kids usually see my wages before I do) so it's nice to contribute something even if the net effect is minute). Yet HTTP/HTTPS is completely unthrottled.