Port 1702: Deskshare — A Registered Port with No One Home

Port 1702 sits in the registered port range, officially assigned by IANA to a service called deskshare. Both TCP and UDP. The IANA contact is a name and an email address at telergy.com — a company that doesn't appear to be operating anymore.

This is what much of the registered port space looks like up close: not chaos, but archaeology.

The Registered Port Range

Port 1702 falls in the registered ports range (1024–49151). This range exists between the well-known ports (0–1023), which require root privileges and are reserved for core Internet services, and the ephemeral ports (49152–65535), which operating systems assign dynamically for outbound connections.

Anyone can apply to IANA to register a port in this range. In the early Internet era, companies and projects did exactly that — staking out a port number for their software the way you'd register a domain name. The difference is that domains expire. Port registrations often don't. They just accumulate, pointing at things that no longer exist.

What Was Deskshare?

The IANA registry entry for port 1702 lists the service as "deskshare" — a desktop sharing protocol. The assigned contact is Sarah Thompson at telergy.com.¹ Telergy appears to have been a telecommunications company, though their web presence is effectively gone.

The deskshare.com domain exists today, but it belongs to an unrelated company selling screen recording software — not the original Telergy product that claimed this port.

There is no surviving RFC, no technical specification, and no documentation describing how the original deskshare protocol worked. Whatever it did, it predated the era when such things were reliably archived.

What You Might Find on Port 1702 Today

Because the registered deskshare service is dormant, any traffic on port 1702 is either:

• Application-specific — software that chose this port arbitrarily or because it was available
• Scanning traffic — automated probes looking for open ports
• Misconfigured services — something that should be on a different port

If you see port 1702 active on a machine you're responsible for, it's worth checking what's actually there.

How to Check What's Listening

On Linux/macOS:

# Show which process is listening on port 1702
sudo ss -tlnp | grep 1702

# Or with lsof
sudo lsof -i :1702

On Windows:

netstat -ano | findstr :1702

The output will show the process ID (PID). You can look that up in Task Manager or with ps aux | grep <PID> on Linux.

Why This Matters

The registered port space is full of entries like this — services that were real once, assigned a number, and then faded. The port number remains, the service doesn't.

This is one reason why "port X is registered for Y" doesn't mean traffic on port X is actually Y. Port registrations are declarations of intent, not enforcement. When the intent evaporates, the registration stays behind.

Port 1702 is quiet. It probably has been for a long time.