Here pole-climbing was extremely common, not sure how things are today as I live in cable territory with no poles anywhere in sight. In 2005 I worked for an electrical contractor and one day our task was replacing a 16 mm2 drop on a wooden pole with 25 mm2. One of the guys put on gaffs, climbed up and replaced the entire drop in less than half an hour, live of course (230/400 V). That was an allotment-type community and the association had a deal with the distribution network operator - they owned all the overhead network within the community and had slightly laxer regulations for metering enclosures, even though the metering was done by the DNO.
Four allotments shared one pole drop and meter cabinet and our task was to replace the guts of one of these metal cabinets with a new class 2 enclosure (that was the deal with the DNO, otherwise we'd have had to replace the entire metal pedestal instead of just putting fibreglass enclosures inside). The feed out of the meters was upgraded from 4 to 16 mm2 and the drop from 16 to 25. I think the original setup was from the late 60s as the cables going out still had pre-1965 colours but were wired according to the harmonised scheme (old 4-core was black, grey, red, blue and they used blue as the neutral, while originally it would've been grey).
