  Motivated by results in optical communications, where the performance can
degrade dramatically if the transmit power is sufficiently increased, the
channel capacity is characterized for various kinds of memoryless vector
channels. It is proved that for all static point-to-point channels, the channel
capacity is a nondecreasing function of power. As a consequence, maximizing the
mutual information over all input distributions with a certain power is for
such channels equivalent to maximizing it over the larger set of input
distributions with upperbounded power. For interference channels such as
optical wavelength-division multiplexing systems, the primary channel capacity
is always nondecreasing with power if all interferers transmit with identical
distributions as the primary user. Also, if all input distributions in an
interference channel are optimized jointly, then the achievable sum-rate
capacity is again nondecreasing. The results generalizes to the channel
capacity as a function of a wide class of costs, not only power.
