Houston ATT ADSL hub, bad ping spikes. Just me?

Yo! Bad ping spikes here lately, ridiculously bad. Worst case so far ~2 sec latency. I'm using TX POE server, sometimes I try Washington. Location East TX, ATT oldschool DSL (no UVerse out in these piney woods).

Taken several WinMTRs. Tends to happen in the evenings and during the weekend. Been through the support desk ringer a few times, a couple of dispatches. My end checking out okay per the line tech and per remote DSL tech checking my SNR through to the CO, and per an actual tier two check from a network ops center support agent.

Looks like upstream. Still working on getting someone to confirm. Hearing from a few of the horses' mouths might be due to ATT losing oldschool DSL customers and consolidating the network, thus choking the bandwidth and causing issues.

Anyone else in similar geography with this ISP and medium (specifically ADSL, not UVerse) noticing horrible ping spiking at times?

I got a TP-Link gateway and generally no complaints, but I'll buy a different unit if it looks like that's the issue. Although my local tests and ATT's seem to indicate it's not me, I'm willing to try at this point. You should see my Flameblast Elementalist in Breach at times, it's a complete loss...

Other solution out here is satellite, and we gamers know that's a no-go for us.

AT&T is probably the problem. I had the same type of service thru them in southwest Louisiana and it was horrible.