Ports and addresses are specified using the TCP/IP network byte ordering convention, which is known as big endian.

In a big endian system, the most significant byte comes first. By contrast, in a little endian system, the least significant byte comes first. MVS™ uses the big endian convention; because this is the same as the network convention, CICS® TCP/IP applications do not need to use any conversion routines, such as htonl, htons, ntohl, and ntohs.