TIL from another comment that the Shannon limit assumes Gaussian noise so it's not actually always the theoretical limit. You can't work around the Shannon lim

TIL from another comment that the Shannon limit assumes Gaussian noise so it's not actually always the theoretical limit. You can't work around the Shannon limit by using encoding. It's the theoretical information content limit. But you can keep reducing the bandwidth and one way of doing that is adding error correction. So intuitively I'd say yes to your question, the distance can go to infinity as long as you're willing to accept an increasingly low receive bit rate. What's less clear to me is whether error correction on its own can be used to approach the Shannon limit for a given S/N ratio - I think the answer is no because you're not able to use the entire underlying bandwidth. But you can still extract a digital signal from noise given enough of a signal... EDIT: There is a generalization of the Shannon limit to non-white Gaussian noise here: https://dsp.stackexchange.com/a/82840 https://dsp.stackexchange.com/a/82840