One of Canada’s new wireless entrants has made a move. Data and Audio-Visual Enterprises Wireless (DAVE), which spent $221 million buying up spectrum in last summer’s auction, announced that it has inked an international roaming agreement with T-Mobile USA. 

"As we move forward with our launch, we will be looking to develop more diverse roaming partnerships to provide our customers with affordable access to voice and data wireless services outside our target markets and internationally," said DAVE President Dave Dobbin said in a release.

The deal will allow DAVE's future wireless subscribers to roam on T-Mobile’s network when traveling to the United States. In addition, T-Mobile subscribers from the U.S. will be able to roam on the DAVE network. The company did not disclose any financial figures for the deal.

The company plans to launch its network in Toronto and as many as 10 other major cities during the first half of 2010. The company owns spectrum covering more than 16 million people in 10 of the Canada's 13 biggest markets, including Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary and Ottawa.

Last summer’s Canadian AWS spectrum auction fetched $3.23 billion dollars, or $4 billion Canadian, and brought in a number of new entrants, ( prompting speculation that the Canadian wireless oligarchy of Bell, Telus and Rogers could be dethroned by new entrants.

In a statement, Dobbin said the company is working to snag more international roaming agreements. Dobbin said the company would also pursue domestic roaming agreements for areas outside its target markets.

DAVE was formed by Canadian holding company Obelysk and Quadrangle Capital Partners, a telecommunications and media investor with more than $6 billion of capital under management.

Canada’s incumbent carrier oligarchy of Rogers, Bell and Telus has long insisted that there isn’t enough room for the new entrant planning to enter the market with recently-purchased spectrum.

However, the Canadian market has plenty of room to grow thanks to its meager 64 percent penetration rate and there has been widespread consumer discontent on issues ranging from cell phone fees to throttling Internet speeds. Despite protests and class action lawsuits over such issues, the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association (CWTA) has stated that the country's wireless subscribers enjoy prices that are below or close to average and "fare significantly better than their neighbors in the U.S. and Mexico in almost all usage categories."

That claim is widely disputed by analysts. The lack of competition in Canada has helped to make the country’s wireless segments the most profitable in the world. According to a report by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Canada’s wireless segment enjoys a 45.9 percent profit margin.

In an effort to boost competition, the Canadian government set aside 40 MHz of spectrum that could only be bid on by new entrants during last summer’s auction. The rest of the spectrum was open to both new entrants and incumbents. The government gave new entrants access to towers for mounting radios and required incumbents to accommodate roaming for five years