Efficient routing in wireless mesh networks is a fundamental issue to be addressed in order to boost real deployments bywireless Internet Service Providers (ISP). In last years, research has shown, mainly by simulation, that a cross-layerdesign can significantly improve network performance. Nevertheless, despite the multitude of solutions proposed, fewhave known a real implementation. In this paper, we propose some measurements, performed on a real Wireless MeshNetwork (WMN), clearly showing the importance of a cross-layer approach in order to improve the performances of the mesh backbone. The platform is composed of MeshDVboxes our custom Wireless Mesh Router (WMR), built up from off-the-shelf hardware and open source software. As a routing protocol we use two versions (with and without cross-layermetrics) of MeshDV, a simple routing protocol expressly de-signed for WMNs. Our tests show that in cases where traditional hop-count metric compromises network connectivity, cross-layer routing is able to maintain it and has still good performances.