Afrihost is also instant, well last i signed up anyway. Mweb still required all kinds of documents from me, and they also phoned me to "verify" all my details.
You should not only look at the activation speed, but how quickly you can change, upgrade,downgrade or cancel your packages too.
Mweb, to name an example, don't even have a freaking "cancel" button anywhere on their site, you have to email and wait until they respond . You can upgrade instantly to a limited extend, but any other changes other than "upgrade" and it becomes a manual process. I never felt Mweb's web interface was up to scratch, it's archaic.
This is why i always end up back at Afrihost, everything of theirs is automatic and instant without even sending a single email to anyone. I even moved my line to them because i can actually "manage" it better than dealing with Telkom, literally a few clicks and there you go.
I'm sure some of the "fresher" ISPs has similar abilities. Telkom is not one of them either, their web interface is even worse than Mweb's. Web Africa had a good interface, but i don't recall them being truly instant and "change on the fly" like Afrihost. This might change when they switch over to IS as their backbone. I imagine IS provides some nice web APIs/Features which can be passed on directly to the end consumer if the reseller writes a nice web app around it, because i tend to see similar "instant" features on IS reseller type of ISPs.
In the end, i tend to keep an account at most ISPs on the lowest packages (i.e their 1GB package) to ensure i don't need to go through all the activation schlep again. And to be honest , between all these ISPs, the only one that i actually used as "fall back, emergency bandwidth" when my currently active ISP failed me, was Afrihost , because it was instant and convenient, even at 3am in the morning.
