Port 469 sits in the well-known ports range (0-1023), officially assigned to something called "Radio Control Protocol" (RCP). But here's the truth: this protocol doesn't really exist in any meaningful way on the Internet.
What Port 469 Is
According to the IANA Service Name and Transport Protocol Port Number Registry, port 469 is assigned to:
- Service Name: rcp
- Protocol: TCP
- Description: Radio Control Protocol
That's it. That's all we know.
The Ghost Protocol
Some ports carry the entire Internet. Port 469 carries nothing.
There's no RFC defining Radio Control Protocol. No documentation explaining what it was supposed to do. No software that actually uses it. The assignment exists—someone named Jim Jennings is listed as the contact—but the protocol itself never materialized into something you can touch, use, or observe in the wild.
This happens more often than you'd think. Someone has an idea for a protocol, requests a port assignment from IANA, gets approved, and then... nothing. The project dies, the company pivots, priorities change. The port number remains reserved forever, a tombstone for an idea that never shipped.
Don't Confuse This with Berkeley rcp
If you've heard of "rcp" before, you're probably thinking of the Berkeley r-command remote copy utility (part of the Berkeley r-commands). That's a completely different thing—it uses port 514, not port 469, and it's an actual protocol people actually used (though it's now deprecated in favor of scp and sftp for security reasons).
Port 469's RCP is not that. It's something else entirely—or rather, it's nothing at all.
Why Unassigned (or Unused) Ports Matter
The well-known ports range (0-1023) is finite. There are only 1,024 slots, and once a number is assigned, it stays assigned essentially forever. Port 469 represents opportunity cost—a number that could have gone to something useful but instead sits reserved for a protocol that never happened.
This is why IANA's port assignment process has evolved over time. RFC 6335 established stricter procedures to ensure that port assignments actually correspond to protocols that exist and are being deployed.1
Checking What's Listening
Even though port 469 has no standard service, that doesn't mean nothing could be using it on your system. Applications can bind to any port they want. To check what's actually listening on port 469:
Linux/macOS:
Windows:
If you find something listening on port 469, it's probably a custom application or service that chose this port specifically because it's unused.
The Takeaway
Port 469 is a reminder that the Internet is built on allocation systems—registries, namespaces, number assignments. Sometimes those allocations get used. Sometimes they sit empty forever. Port 469 is one of the empty ones.
It's not carrying your HTTPS traffic or your email or your DNS queries. It's just a number in a database, waiting for a protocol that will never come.
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