An analysis is presented of issues surrounding the integration of the open systems interconnection (OSI) protocols into an operational national network. The OSI protocols are evolving as international standards and they have been adopted by the US government as a Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS). Yet, a complete OSI protocol stack is still under development, profiles for options within the protocol suite are yet to be defined for government networks, and product availability is somewhat sparse. In addition, there are issues to address when wide area networks that are disjoint due to the use of different networking protocols all start using common protocols, particularly in the area of routing. These items are studied from the perspective of a large operational network (the NASA Science Internet).>