Entanglement underpins a variety of quantum-enhanced communication, sensing, and computing capabilities. Entanglement-assisted communication (EACOMM) leverages entanglement preshared by communicating parties to boost the rate of classical information transmission. Pioneering theory works showed that EACOMM can enable a communication rate well beyond the ultimate classical capacity of optical communications, but an experimental demonstration of any EACOMM advantage remains elusive. In this Letter we report the implementation of EACOMM surpassing the classical capacity over lossy and noisy bosonic channels. We construct a high-efficiency entanglement source and a phase-conjugate quantum receiver to reap the benefit of preshared entanglement, despite entanglement being broken by channel loss and noise. We show that EACOMM beats the Holevo-Schumacher-Westmoreland capacity of classical communication by up to 16.3%, when both protocols are subject to the same power constraint at the transmitter. As a practical performance benchmark, we implement a classical communication protocol with the identical characteristics for the encoded signal, showing that EACOMM can reduce the bit-error rate by up to 69% over the same bosonic channel. Our work opens a route to provable quantum advantages in a wide range of quantum information processing tasks.
The entanglement-assisted capacity of a quantum channel admits an additive single-letter characterization, implying that joint encodings across channel uses cannot increase the ultimate communication rate. Here, we show that this additive picture does not extend to communication reliability. Specifically, we prove that the Petz-Rényi channel information can be strictly superadditive for every
α∈[1/2,1), yielding a genuine multi-copy enhancement of the entanglement-assisted random-coding error exponent, even though the entanglement-assisted capacity remains additive. We establish this phenomenon analytically already for measurement channels, which are entanglement-breaking and have additive unassisted capacity. Remarkably, this strict superadditivity is witnessed by a separable, classically correlated two-copy channel-input marginal, demonstrating that no entanglement between the transmitted systems is required. Our results show that, although correlations across channel uses cannot increase the ultimate rate of entanglement-assisted communication, they can enhance its reliability.