  In quantum communication protocols, the use of photon-number-resolving
detectors could open new perspectives by broadening the way to encode and
decode information, and merging the properties of discrete and continuous
variables. In this work, we consider a quantum channel exploiting a
Silicon-photomultiplier-based receiver and evaluate its performance for quantum
communication protocols under three possible configurations, defined by
different post-processing of the detection outcomes. We investigate two
scenarios: information transmission over the channel, quantified by the mutual
information, and continuous-variable quantum key distribution. The preliminary
results encourage further use of this detection scheme in extended networks.
