  In analogy with its classical counterpart, a noisy quantum channel is
characterized by a loss, a quantity that depends on the channel input and the
quantum operation performed by the channel. The loss reflects the transmission
quality: if the loss is zero, quantum information can be perfectly transmitted
at a rate measured by the quantum source entropy. By using block coding based
on sequences of n entangled symbols, the average loss (defined as the overall
loss of the joint n-symbol channel divided by n, when n tends to infinity) can
be made lower than the loss for a single use of the channel. In this context,
we examine several upper bounds on the rate at which quantum information can be
transmitted reliably via a noisy channel, that is, with an asymptotically
vanishing average loss while the one-symbol loss of the channel is non-zero.
These bounds on the channel capacity rely on the entropic Singleton bound on
quantum error-correcting codes [Phys. Rev. A 56, 1721 (1997)]. Finally, we
analyze the Singleton bounds when the noisy quantum channel is supplemented
with a classical auxiliary channel.
