  We study the hopping conductivity in a composite made of Gaussian coils of
flexible metallic wires randomly and isotropically suspended in an insulator at
such concentrations that the spheres containing each wire overlap. Uncontrolled
donors and acceptors in the insulator lead to random charging of wires and,
hence, to a finite density of states (DOS) at the Fermi level. Then the Coulomb
interactions between electrons of distant wires result in the soft Coulomb gap.
At low temperatures the conductivity is due to variable range hopping of
electrons between wires and obeys the Efros-Shklovskii (ES) law $\ln\sigma
\propto -(T_{ES}/T)^{1/2}$ with $T_{ES}$ decreasing with concentration and
length of the wires. Due to enhanced screening of Coulomb potentials, at large
enough wire concentrations and sufficiently high temperatures, the ES law is
replaced by the Mott law $\ln\sigma \propto -(T_{M}/T)^{1/4}$.
