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BEIDOU-3 M3

Chinese Navigation Satellite (BeiDou-3) · CNSA / China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation

BeiDou-3 M3, launched in 2018, contributes to a BeiDou-3 constellation whose civilian positioning accuracy now genuinely rivals GPS for most consumer applications — most modern Chinese-market smartphones, and increasingly many international models, include BeiDou-compatible chips as standard alongside GPS, GLONASS, and Galileo support. BeiDou's civilian signal now reaches an estimated one billion devices worldwide, from Chinese-made smartphones to imported vehicles with multi-constellation chips, a global footprint that took the system barely a decade to build compared to GPS's original multi-decade rollout.