How best to partition a table on subscriber ?

Hello,

There is a request from customer to implement partitioning on a very big and hot table (~ 1 TB with 2bn records) – As this table on the subscriber and receives the changes via Transaction Replication from highly available publisher database, replication reports some latency. Appreciate if someone shed light on two points.

1. What is the best way to partition this table? I am considering it doing when latency is not much and will disable distribution agent during the activity to avoid blocking.
2. If default escalation is changed to AUTO so to escalate lock to Partition level rather than to table level – will that of help?

Env: SQL Server 2012 Enterprise Edition