Port 2464: DirecPC SI — A Satellite Internet Fossil

Port 2464 is registered to DirecPC SI, a service belonging to Hughes Network Systems' DirecPC platform — the world's first consumer satellite Internet service, launched in 1996.¹

The "SI" designation likely refers to a satellite interface or signaling component within the DirecPC protocol stack. No public documentation of the specific protocol survives in accessible form.

What DirecPC Was

In 1996, Hughes Network Systems launched DirecPC: satellite Internet for homes and small businesses. A 24-inch dish on your roof, pointed at a geostationary satellite, could deliver downloads at up to 400 Kbps — roughly 40 times faster than the 28.8 Kbps modems most people were using.²

The catch: it only worked downhill. Data arrived from space at high speed, but your uploads still traveled out through a phone line. You needed both a dish and a dial-up connection running simultaneously. Asymmetric in the most literal sense — one pipe pointed at the sky, another plugged into the wall.

DirecPC evolved into DirecDuo, then DirecWay (2002, when Hughes finally added two-way satellite capability), and eventually became HughesNet in 2006.³ The dish got smaller. The phone line went away. The port number stayed.

Port Range

Port 2464 sits in the registered ports range (1024–49151). These ports are assigned by IANA to specific services upon request. Unlike well-known ports (0–1023), registered ports don't require root privileges to bind — any process can open them.

IANA lists port 2464 as assigned to DirecPC SI on both TCP and UDP.⁴

Current Status

DirecPC as a service no longer exists. The port is registered but effectively dormant — no active software is known to use it. It won't appear in a standard service scan, and finding something listening on 2464 today would be unusual enough to warrant investigation.

Checking What's on This Port

To see if anything is listening on port 2464 on your machine:

# Linux / macOS
ss -tlnp | grep 2464
# or
lsof -i :2464

# Windows
netstat -ano | findstr :2464

An empty result is the expected and correct outcome.

Why Registered Ports Stay Registered

IANA doesn't reclaim ports. Once assigned, a port number belongs to that service indefinitely — even if the company folds, the product is discontinued, or the protocol is never publicly documented. This is by design: changing assignments would break any legacy systems still running.

Port 2464 is one of thousands of registered ports that predate the modern Internet and will remain formally assigned long after anyone remembers what DirecPC SI was.