Choose with
A greedy packing construction gives binary length- codes of minimum distance greater than and size at least
Their asymptotic rate is at least
where is binary Binary entropy. Minimum-distance decoding corrects every error pattern of weight at most . Since a channel error count is , the law of large numbers gives
Thus a fixed positive rate is achievable with error tending to zero, proving that the operational capacity is nonzero. This is the positive-rate coding bound below one-quarter crossover.