Shortly before and after Comcast Corporation (NASDAQ:CMCSA) got into the wireless phone game back in April of last year, T-Mobile Us Inc (NASDAQ:TMUS) CEO John Legere was all too happy to supply his typical taunts of existing and potential competitors. Comcast stock-owners didn’t sweat the ribbing too much, though. They didn’t expect the cable company’s foray into mobile phones to amount to much anytime soon anyway. At the time, Legere actually had some legitimate points.

Nearly one year removed from Comcast’s launch of Xfinity Mobile, however, Legere isn’t laughing quite as much — at least not on the inside. As it turns out, there may something there for the wireless service.

Legere is still throwing his taunts around, to be clear. Earlier this month he made a point of saying “(Xfinity Mobile) is very irrelevant, and I would assume Charter will be irrelevant squared … I think they’re incompetent and they don’t belong in wireless without having owner economics.”

The timbre and tone of the proverbial fightin’ words, however, are starting to sound suspiciously defensive.

Comcast Not So Crazy After All

The short version of a long story: Cable television company Comcast, with some help from Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE:VZ) infrastructure, got into its own wireless business early last year. It is the shape of things to come, as the lines between medium and messenger continue to blur.

Still, nobody (arguably not even Comcast) saw the move into the new market as an effort that would alter the landscape of the wireless market even on a long-term basis.

Perhaps everyone should rethink that idea. Last quarter, Comcast added another 187,000 users to its Xfinity Mobile service, bringing the headcount up to 380,000 paying customers.

It’s not a lot, to be clear, compared to the companies Comcast will need to steal customers from. T-Mobile picked up 2.8 million postpaid phone customers for all of 2017, while Verizon — already the nation’s biggest wireless name by subscriber count — still added 774,000 net users last year. But, red-hot growth was never the point — at least not yet. Indeed, the company is limiting the growth of its mobile telecom service by only offering it to existing cable subscribers, as a means of keeping them in the fold by establishing more links to them.

From a proof-of-concept point of view though, the foray into the new market is something other wireless providers as well as current and prospective owners of Comcast stock will want to note.

CBRS Helps Comcast Stock

But how is Comcast providing wireless service in a market where bandwidth and radio frequencies are in short supply?

If you haven’t yet, add this term to your mobile lexicon: Citizens Broadband Radio Service, or CBRS for short. It’s the next evolution in the wireless space, and one that could prove particularly noteworthy to Comcast stock-holders.

The simplest explanation is, the FCC has opened up CBRS bands for commercial use. While frequencies in this range work just as well as higher or lower frequencies do for wireless communications, they’re well suited for short-distance Wi-Fi connections, as opposed to the tower-to-phone connections the wireless industry was founded on. Yes, that means Comcast will need to install thousands of CBRS antennas in a relatively small area to provide seamless coverage for its mobile customers. It’s not cheap. Then again, neither is renting access to traditional cell phone towers.

More important than the logistics and cost, however, is that this approach works surprisingly well, working around the problem of limited bandwidth and scarce frequencies.

Look for Philadelphia, where Comcast is based, to be the first full-scale guinea pig that will prove CBRS frequencies are a viable alternative to tradition long-range cellular connections.

Also note that while Legere may be laughing at Comcast, T-Mobile is also working on the development of its own small cell network that employs the same idea. The company’s just using a different range of frequencies to do it. Clearly there’s some merit to the idea, even if Comcast currently lacks the scale it needs to achieve viability.

Bottom Line for Comcast Stock

Comcast still poses no major threat to entrenched carries like T-Mobile or AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T). Nothing last forever though. As the company figures out the optimal (seamless) mix of Wi-Fi connections and traditional tower-based connections, it could easily open up its platform to subscribers outside of its cable television circle.

Or, more realistically, it could partner up with an existing, large mobile carrier and offer packages, not unlike the way AT&T has cross-sold wireless and cable television services after its 2015 acquisition of DirecTV.

There’s the rub for Legere and others. Nobody really knows where this might go. But, there’s no doubt that it’s going somewhere for Comcast stock, even if at a snail’s pace.

In the meantime, if nothing else, the advent of a viable wireless service from Comcast could apply another layer of pressure on the major names in the business to keep their prices lower than they might like — a headwind that’s already nagging at the big names in the business.

As of this writing, James Brumley did not hold a position in any of the aforementioned securities. You can follow him on Twitter, at @jbrumley.