Port throttling/traffic shaping with P2P

I'm on AOL and it seems this week they've started traffic shaping/port throttling (what's the difference?) with P2P.

How can I test if it's being throttled? I use torrents (uTorrent) and Ares.

Is there any good way to avoid it? I don't know much about ports but could I just set the P2P apps to use a different port.

WIth P2P it is difficult as how do you know it is not just slow peers or traffic shaping?

General way is to try different applications and if they are significantly faster and you know your P2P sources are good ones then management may be the reason

I've tried different torrents and different things on Ares. I can never get a total speed higher than around 20kb/s. Downloading normally from websites works fine and I get good speed.

If you don't want selectively managed traffic you'll have to change to an ISP or package that offers such a thing. Otherwise you'll be locked into an arms race with the ISP deploying ever more complex methods to restrict P2P throughput.