Why is the NSA model still the first choice for 5G in various countries at this stage?

On June 6th, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology officially issued 5G commercial licenses to China Mobile, China Unicom, China Telecom and China Radio and Television, and China officially entered the first year of 5G commercialization.

The first year of commercialization means the beginning of an era. For individual users, it means the update of mobile devices.

Many users began to care about the technical problems of the 5G network. According to the original development law of 4G, it will take at least several years from the issuance of commercial licenses to trial commercialization, and then to large-scale commercialization and coverage. This involves a key point: what kind of networking method should 5G adopt?

To put it simply, there are currently two networking modes for 5G, one is non-independent networking (NSA) and the other is independent networking (SA). An interesting phenomenon is that the network that was rarely discussed in the 4G era is now making a lot of noise, because 5G is ready for commercial use. The reason is that there is a big difference between relying on networking and independent networking.

So, what are non-independent networking (NSA) and independent networking (SA)? Here is a simple chestnut to help you understand.

Suppose there is a real estate developer whose real estate sales are very hot. Every day, many people come to see the house and buy a house, earning a lot of money. However, the enterprise is profit-oriented and will never make much money, so this developer intends to expand the building, but it will consume a lot of manpower and material resources and cannot invest blindly, so he thought of the following two schemes:

Scheme 1: build a new building near the original building, and the sales staff and property management company will be transferred from the original building. This scheme can save construction cost and labor cost;

Option 2: Go to a brand-new city to develop a new property, and all the sales staff and property management companies will be re-recruited. This option is relatively more "burning money", but it may also be more popular than the original property.

In the above example, the first scheme corresponds to dependent networking (NSA), while the second scheme corresponds to independent networking (SA).