Yesterday morning whilst out for my daily walk I passed our FTTC cabs, 1 ECI and 1 Huawei, to find two OR engineers with both the PCP and ECI cabinet open. On the way back I noticed they were still at it and appeared to be terminating a tie cable between the ECI cab and the PCP. This surprised me somewhat as the ECI cab was at capacity some years ago, hence the Huawei twin.
About 30 mins after returning home our DSL link went down so I decided to wander back around and see what was happening. On mentioning the loss of DSL to the guy in the ECI cab he told me it would be off for about 1 hour as they were "doing 30 connections at a time". He went on to say that when it did come back "it would be faster as they were putting in new cables" After a bit of chat I learned that they were in fact replacing the tie cables between the cab and the PCP with Cat 5 ones, to reduce crosstalk.
When the line came back up I was surprised to see an increase in speed of around 6Mb, given that we are on a 475 metre underground feed.
This is not an activity that I have heard of anywhere, but the outage was notified on Zen's status portal as "Cat 5 cable upgrade".