Comcast executives are reportedly considering expanding the company’s telephone service into the mobile realm—or at least letting customers cut the cord to the cable modem. The Information reports that Comcast is looking at a plan that would offer mobile voice and data service over Wi-Fi hotspots, with leased cellular network capacity filling in the holes.

Comcast already offers a service, called Voice 2go, that allows existing Xfinity Voice customers to make calls from an Android or iOS device over existing Wi-Fi, using their existing home phone number. Voice2go works from any Wi-Fi connection. But the Voice2go app requires the caller to stay connected to the same Wi-Fi hotspot for the entire call, so it’s not exactly “mobile” in the sense that cellular networks are.

The new service would work in a fashion similar to that of Republic Wireless, which uses leased 3G and 4G cellular network capacity (in Republic’s case, from Sprint) as a fallback when Wi-Fi networks aren’t present. Comcast could also use its existing infrastructure to offer public Wi-Fi coverage in some areas, as it's begun to do in some states by adding a public Wi-Fi hotspot to existing home modems. As Comcast noted in a filing for its proposed acquisition of Time Warner Cable, the company has "the largest Wi-Fi network in the nation." The filing also refers to a possible phone service, saying, "A ubiquitous Wi-Fi network built by Comcast could make a 'Wi-Fi-first' service, which combines commercial mobile radio service with Wi-Fi, a more viable alternative.”

The plan remains just a discussion right now, and it could face certain regulatory challenges—Comcast gave up previous ambitions to enter the cellular business, and the regulatory scrutiny it faces with the proposed acquisition of Time Warner Cable could kill this idea before it’s born. But if and when the Time Warner Cable acquisition is completed, Comcast would have a significant user base and network from which to launch itself into mobile, giving it another way to compete with Verizon’s FiOS.