This happens to me as well on Time Warner/Brighthouse.
I get 1.5mb/sec capped normally. You can see the straight-line limit on xosview. It's pretty obvious it's capped. Bit-torrent is capped to the point of unusability, something like 0.25mb/sec.
If I use VPN, it more than doubles to almost 4mb/sec for everything. Youtube, NetFlix, http, bit-torrent, etc.
I can't see how it can go through another "uncongested route" as it still has to make it out of my ISP.