  Recent work has precisely characterized the achievable trade-offs between
three key information processing tasks---classical communication (generation or
consumption), quantum communication (generation or consumption), and shared
entanglement (distribution or consumption), measured in bits, qubits, and ebits
per channel use, respectively. Slices and corner points of this
three-dimensional region reduce to well-known protocols for quantum channels. A
trade-off coding technique can attain any point in the region and can
outperform time-sharing between the best-known protocols for accomplishing each
information processing task by itself. Previously, the benefits of trade-off
coding that had been found were too small to be of practical value (viz., for
the dephasing and the universal cloning machine channels). In this letter, we
demonstrate that the associated performance gains are in fact remarkably high
for several physically relevant bosonic channels that model free-space /
fiber-optic links, thermal-noise channels, and amplifiers. We show that
significant performance gains from trade-off coding also apply when trading
photon-number resources between transmitting public and private classical
information simultaneously over secret-key-assisted bosonic channels.
