Countries in the Gulf Region will be connected via a new submarine cable network provided by Gulf Bridge International (GBI). GBI will roll out over the next two years the submarine cable infrastructure, which is expected to be operational in 2011. BT's Subsea Centre of Excellence is designing the system, which is based on a self-healing ring network configuration, enabling traffic to be re-routed if the main cable gets cut. GBI is a privately owned submarine cable operator backed by a number of regional and international enterprises such as Knowledge Ventures, Al Madar Telecom and Metel.