In my understanding the diference between deploying 5G-NR-NSA and SA is mostly an software one. You need to have 5G capable RRU heads anyway. On the other hand

In my understanding the diference between deploying 5G-NR-NSA and SA is mostly an software one. You need to have 5G capable RRU heads anyway. On the other hand from the bussiness and operations side there are two things: (1) 5G-NR-SA does not have any obvious benefits when you still have to support LTE-only UEs (and even GSM-only ones). (2) Many hardware vendors and carriers combine the 5G rollout with bunch of only tangetially related network changes like getting rid of ZTE/Huawei equipment, various "k8s on the edge" initiatives and such.