For all its troubles in its licensing business, Qualcomm still consistently sets the pace in modem engineering. Its X50 5G modem chipset, which it launched last year, has now hit gigabit download speeds in a demonstration at the firm’s labs in San Diego, the first publicly to achieve this central goal of 5G standards. It has also pointed to a 5G world in which “10,000” spectrum bands may be in play, making the current model of global band harmonization redundant. The company used the X50 combined with the SDR051 RF transceiver chip, showing that Qualcomm aims to supply the whole chain from processor to modem to RF in 5G, as it has started to do in 4G since launching its…