New Delhi, Feb. 21 (PTI): Mukesh Ambani today said Reliance Jio would be ready to commercially launch its 4G telecom services in the second half of this year, offering 80 per cent of Indians high-speed mobile Internet as well as voice services.

Reliance Jio had in late December unveiled 4G service for its employees, marking Ambani's return to the telecom sector years after Reliance Group's telecom unit had gone to his younger brother Anil, following a split between the two siblings.

"We'll be ready to launch in the second half of 2016. Eighty per cent of India's population will have high-speed, mobile broadband Internet.

"So 80 per cent of the 1.3 billion Indians will have high-speed, mobile Internet. And by 2017, we would cover 90 per cent. And by 2018, all of India would be covered by this digital infrastructure," he said in an interview to a news channel.

Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd's 4G services are now available to roughly 120,000 employees, their families and business partners.

A unit of Reliance Industries Ltd, Jio has invested close to $15 billion in the telecom venture so far. It holds the highest amount of liberalised (free to use for any service) spectrum among operators, totalling 51.1MHz across the 800MHz, 1,800MHz and 2,300MHz bands.

On Reliance's massive investment in acquiring airwaves and laying physical infrastructure to offer high-speed Internet services, Ambani said he believed that humanity was at the doorstep of massive change, and "we're just at the beginning of the information and the digital age".

"And in the next 20 years, in a network society, we are going to have change much more than what we have seen in the last hundred years," he said.