Intel was licensing the patents from Qualcomm. . . but they could not get their chips to perform as well. That does not mean there is no standard. There is a Standard Essential Patent set that must be used/ by every manufacturer of cellular device simply to even connect to the network. If you think there isn’t, then you don’t know what you are talking about.
Intel CDMA and LTE modem chips worked fine. . . but their attempts to develop an alternative 5G system foundered. The two different modems in the iPhones performed the same, no matter which one you had in your iPhone because the better performance in the Qualcomm modem was disabled. Speed wise, you would not notice any difference between a high-end Android phone with the Qualcomm higher speed modem enabled and an iPhone without it, because the iPhone has a far faster CPU than any Android phone. Real time downloads results were still faster for most purposes on the iPhone due to the faster CPU processing.
Nope. By your own admission Intel couldn't keep up with Qualcomm and therefore Intel was inferior. There are loads of links similar to the one below.
Apple confirmed limiting iPhone 7 Qualcomm modem to keep performance on par with Intel chip
There is a Standard Essential Patent set that must be used/ by every manufacturer of cellular device simply to even connect to the network.
Well then, I invite you to provide to me the specific numbers of these patents. If you mean there's a common communication protocol then that's true.